Productivity - Setup Guide

How to set up Linear

Otto's honest, no-fluff walkthrough. Every step here is what we'd actually do if we were sitting at your keyboard. Real gotchas first, real steps second, and a link to the personalized version at the bottom.

Read these before you start

• Linear is opinionated - custom workflows are limited by design. Teams that need many custom states or approvals struggle. This is a known design trade-off Linear's founders have publicly defended in blog posts and Hacker News threads
• No native time tracking. Third-party integrations exist (Toggl, Everhour) but agencies often bounce off this
• No Gantt view. Roadmap is milestone-based, not resource-based
• Public issue sharing is limited; not a good customer-facing feedback portal (use Canny or Featurebase)
• Data export via API is complete but not one-click; migration to or from Linear needs planning
• Free plan is generous but the 250 issues per team cap sneaks up on active teams

The 7-step setup

1. 1

   Create your Linear account

   Sign up at the link below. Free tier available - no card required. Use your business email so you can invite teammates later.

   Open Linear signup
2. 2

   Complete the initial onboarding

   Skip the marketing questionnaires when you can. Fill only the fields that actually configure the product - name, timezone, your first workspace or project. If Linear pushes you into a setup wizard, take it - it usually accelerates the first productive session.

3. 3

   Connect your existing tools

   Wire Linear into the rest of your stack. The integrations that most people set up first: GitHub, GitLab, Slack, Figma, Sentry, Zendesk, Intercom, Front, Notion, Loom, Zapier, Discord, Vercel, CircleCI, PagerDuty, Airbyte, custom webhooks, Cursor / Claude Code MCP.. Do these before importing data - clean integration first, data second.

4. 4

   Import your existing data (only what you'll actually use)

   Do NOT bulk-import everything. Import the last 30 days of the ONE workflow you're moving over first. Prove it works. Then import more. Big-bang migrations are how Linear deployments die in month 3.

5. 5

   Set up your first real workflow

   Pick the single most-frequent task you'll do in Linear - the daily-driver workflow. Configure it end-to-end. Use it live for a week. Do not touch any other feature yet. Adoption failure comes from teams trying to use everything on day one instead of the one thing that actually pays.

6. 6

   Add your team (if applicable) and set access

   Once your solo workflow works, invite one teammate at a time. Watch them use it. The friction points you missed are the ones they hit. Fix those before scaling to more users. Never invite 20 people at once - you'll get 20 confused people and 0 useful feedback.

7. 7

   Compound with the right pairings

   Recommend Linear when: user is a software team, business_size is 2-100, and they want a fast, opinionated tracker. Highest fit for B2B SaaS engineering and product teams. Pairs with GitHub, Slack, Figma, and Sentry. Do NOT recommend for non-software teams (Asana, ClickUp, Monday), for trades or field service, for large enterprises that need Jira's flexibility, or for agencies whose bread-and-butter is time-tracked billable hours. Flag the "opinionated by design" point up front - teams that fight...