Arranging your dashboard

The Overview tab is a grid of cells, and you choose which cards appear on your dashboard and where each one sits. Five minutes here is worth it: the default is a reasonable guess about what a coach wants to see first, and it is not a guess about you.

The same Configure button and the same dialog arrange four screens, and everything on this page applies to all of them:

• your dashboard, the Overview tab of Clients;
• a client record, the screen you land on when you open somebody;
• a client’s Tracking → Overview;
• their Tracking → Habits and Tracking → Nutrition.

On the tracking screens the row of figures at the top is not part of the grid. It is the screen’s own summary, it is what tells you whether to read the rest, and the same dialog chooses which figures it shows.

Configure, under the cards on the right, is the way in. It is the only edit control on the page. An empty cell is also a button, and clicking one opens Configure on that cell, where Add widget puts something in it.

The things you are arranging get called three names in different places, and they are all the same thing: a card on the page, a widget in the picker, a panel when somebody is describing the screen to you.

Choose the shape first

2, 3 or 4 columns, and 1 to 4 rows on your dashboard, or 2 to 5 rows on a client record.

Then click any cell to choose what it shows, or to empty it. The grid inside the dialog is not a preview of your dashboard, it is the control: every cell in it is a button.

Nothing is applied until you press Save, so you can try a shape and change your mind with Cancel.

Reset to default puts back the six cards Protocol ships with, in a three-by-two grid.

Making a card bigger

A card can take two rows, two columns, or both.

Two rows tall

Some cards are really lists: your notifications, a check-in queue, everything a client still owes you. One cell is often not enough room for them, and one cell is all the others need.

Click a cell and choose Make it two rows tall. That card then takes the cell directly underneath it as well, and reads as one tall card on the page.

Two things to know before you do it:

• The cell underneath is emptied, and whatever was in it comes off the grid. There is nowhere else for it to go, and shuffling the rest of the grid to make room would undo the arrangement you are in the middle of making. You will see it happen in the dialog straight away, and Cancel still puts everything back.
• The bottom row cannot do it, because there is no row below it to grow into. The option simply is not offered there.

Back to one row frees the cell underneath again. It comes back empty rather than with the old card in it: you took that one off deliberately, and putting it back would be Protocol arguing with you.

Two columns wide

Some cards are wide rather than tall: a chart, a table with seven columns, a strip with one bar per day. Make it two columns wide gives a card the cell to its right, on the same terms: that cell is emptied, the last column is not offered it, and Back to one column hands it back empty.

A card can be both, and then it takes a two-by-two block of four cells.

What ships this way

• A client record gives Profile notes and Todos two rows each, which is what fills its grid with ten cards and no holes.
• Tracking → Overview gives Progress photos a two-by-two block, because two portrait frames in a third of the width are thumbnails, and Measurements the full width of its row.
• Habits gives Daily completion the full width. At half the width its bars are two pixels apart and clicking the day your client forgot becomes a game of darts.
• Nutrition gives the day-logs table the full width, because it is a seven-column table.

An empty cell is a choice

Leave a cell empty and it stays empty. The cards do not close up around it, because if they did, filling one hole would shuffle every card after it and quietly undo the arrangement you chose.

That is also why an empty cell keeps its dashed outline rather than disappearing. It is a space you decided on, not a gap waiting to be filled.

The same card, twice

A card can sit in as many cells as you like, and each placement keeps its own filters. That is the reason to have a grid at all:

• Tasks filtered to your own name, next to Tasks filtered to a shared board.
• Notifications showing money, next to Notifications showing check-ins and forms.
• Today narrowed to sessions, beside Today narrowed to consults.

The picker tells you how many cells already hold a card, as information rather than a warning. Setting a filter on one of them never touches the other.

Picking the card that is already in a cell leaves it exactly as it was, filters included, so an accidental second pick costs you nothing.

What happens when you resize

Growing the grid adds empty cells. If you keep the same number of columns, the holes you left on purpose stay where they were.

Shrinking has to drop something, and it drops from the end. You read a grid from the top left, so the last cells are the ones you care about least. Everything that survives keeps its order.

The filters belonging to a card you removed are cleared with it, so putting the same card back later gives you a clean one rather than something you set up months ago.

On a narrow screen

Below a wide desktop the grid becomes a single column, in the order you arranged it. Cell arrangement is a desktop idea, but the order you chose is a real preference and it survives.

Two-row cards are a desktop idea too: in a single column there is nothing for a tall card to be tall next to, so it reads at the same size as everything else.

Your layout follows you

The arrangement belongs to you, not to the computer you made it on. Arrange your dashboard on the office desktop and it is there when you open Protocol on a laptop, a phone, or a different browser. It is private: nobody on your team sees your layout, and no client sees it.

The most recent save wins. Rearrange things on a laptop and the desktop picks that up the next time you open it, rather than the other way round.

This changed on 9 September 2026. Before that the arrangement lived only in the browser you set it up in, so a second machine showed the default until you arranged it too. If you had arranged a dashboard on more than one computer back then, the newest of those wins and the others catch up the first time you open them.

Your design and theme choices follow you the same way.

A client screen is one layout for every client

The record and tracking grids are one arrangement you use for every client, not one per person. Arrange each once and every client you open looks the same, which is the point: you learn where things are.

So changing one of these layouts while you are looking at one client changes it for all of them. There is nothing to undo per client, and nothing to set up again when you take on somebody new. A client who has no lean-mass readings simply draws no lean-mass tile; the arrangement does not change, the data does.