Session tools make a shared plan interactive for live sessions such as a retrospective. There are two: a timer for time-boxing an activity, and dot-voting for prioritising cards as a group. Anyone who can edit the plan can run them, and they sync to everyone in real time.
Where to find them
The tools live in the bottom-right cluster: Timer and Vote sit together in one strip, right after Undo and Redo and before Trash, New, Find and Types. They show on a tab whose board is made for voting, one that takes a card type with a Votes field, such as the Retro board of the Team Retro template (its Notes and Ideas), or any board whose card types you have given Votes. See Card Types. They never show on a Dashboard tab, and a timer or vote already running keeps its button so it can be seen and stopped.
Each button opens its tool in a popover above it. While a tool is idle its button is just an icon, and pressing it opens the set-up. Once it is going the button shows what is happening: the Timer shows its clock, and the Vote button shows how many dots you have left. Visitors on a Participant or Viewer link see the buttons only while those tools are running. The strip stays in Zen mode, so a facilitator can still run the session there.
On a desktop, a running vote's popover stays open while you work on the board: only pressing its button again puts it away, and it closes by itself when the vote ends. The timer's popover, and any set-up popover, closes as soon as you click elsewhere: the clock stays on the Timer button.
The timer and the vote are scoped to a single tab, so different tabs can run different activities, and they ride the same live sync as everything else in the plan. That means people who join late or reload simply see what is happening now: a timer mid-countdown, or the votes cast so far, with nothing to set up again.
- Timer time-boxes an activity, as a countdown or a stopwatch counting up from zero (one runs at a time), shown on its button in the bottom bar. See The Timer.
- Dot-voting lets each participant spend a budget of dots on the cards they care about, with live tallies and a results reveal. See Dot Voting.
Who can do what
Session tools follow the plan's roles automatically. Anyone with an Editor link (and the owner, and team members) can run the controls and take part: starting the timer, casting votes. Visitors on a Participant link take part but never run anything: they cast dots, while starting, revealing and clearing stay with editors. Visitors on a Viewer link can still watch, they see the timer ticking and the tallies, but they cannot control the session or cast a dot, and they only get a tool's button in the bottom bar while it is running. Typically whoever runs the session holds an Editor link, the team shares a Participant link, and observers follow a Viewer link.
A vote is narrower still. Anyone who can take part (an Editor or a Participant) can cast dots, but only the person who started the vote can end it, reveal the results, clear it, or drive the results walkthrough. Ending a vote can't be undone, so it isn't something a participant should be able to do by accident. See Dot Voting.
What a viewer actually sees during a vote also depends on its privacy settings: with Hide running counts on, nobody sees anyone else's dots until the results are revealed.
What does and does not get recorded
Neither tool adds to Undo: starting a timer or placing a dot is not the kind of thing you would want to Ctrl+Z. When a vote ends, each card keeps the dots it gathered as its Votes. A plan in This Browser has no live room to share them with.
Share a Participant link with everyone who should vote and add cards, and a Viewer link with anyone who only needs to watch. The roles do the gating for you, with no extra setup.
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