When should I Archive?
Archiving is for those Stories that were proposed, maybe even worked on a bit, but ultimately abandoned. They may have been ahead of their time or just slightly off the mark, whatever the case, they never made it to Done. Since we intend Shortcut to also be a system of record, you should archive Stories when you want to maintain a record that the idea was considered at one point, but also reserve the option to revive them in the future.
While the Backlog is related, it should be reserved for Stories that will be worked on at some point in the future.
Should I Archive Done stories?
To mark a story as done, all you need to do is move it to a “Done” workflow state. If you find that your Story board feels too cluttered, you can choose to just hide those workflow columns from your default view.
Archiving a Done Story:
- removes valuable Story relationship information
- removes it from your Epic progress (making it appear that less has been done)
- makes it harder to find in Shortcut
- Archived stories are not included within any Reports
So for all those reasons, we generally discourage you from archiving Done Stories.
How do I find Archived Stories in Shortcut?
Once archived, those Stories can still appear in the overhead search bar, but you can filter for Archived Stories using the “is:archived” Search Operator in the Search bar:
Archiving is also a half step to deleting. In a perfect world, you’d never need to delete anything in Shortcut but sometimes you make a mistake or just need something to be gone forever. In that case, you’d archive first and then delete.
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