"Private projects: only for their manager and participants"

A private project is visible to its manager, its participants and the person who marked it, and nobody else. For everyone else in your account it is as if it did not exist, including the account Owner, people with Technical administration permissions and any Supervisor who does not take part in it.

How to mark it

Open the project. You must be its manager.
Click the padlock button above the title and confirm.
The project gets a dark Private label (with a padlock) on its page, and a padlock next to its name in the lists, the Kanban and the Board.

To remove it, click the padlock again (only the person who marked it). The project stops being private and is visible again under the normal rules.

You can also ask Kairos ("mark this project as private"); the same rules apply. The padlock is only available if your account has Team linked to Manager and Participants of Projects and your Team record is linked to your user.

Who can see it

The manager and the participants of the project. If you add someone as a participant they see it immediately; if you remove them, they stop seeing it.
The person who marked it, even if they later stop being the manager.
Nobody else, anywhere in WorkOS: Projects lists, Kanban and Board (also not under "Others" or "No manager"), searches, @mentions, the pickers to link tasks, documents, notes, meetings or emails, the Projects tabs of a Company or a Contact, Kairos and the Claude or ChatGPT connector.

If someone without access tries to open it with its direct link, they get the same message as for a project that does not exist.

What happens to linked items

Tasks, documents, notes, meetings and emails linked to a private project keep their own visibility rules: whoever sees them today still sees them. But anyone who cannot see the project will see "Private project" instead of its name, with no link. Mentions of the project inside other records look the same. If the project has a linked company or contacts, it does not appear in their records for people who cannot see it.

Subprojects are independent: each has its own padlock. A private subproject does not appear on its parent project's page for people who cannot see it; a private parent project does not hide its public subprojects (they show without "Depends on").

What each person can do

The manager and the participants work on the project as usual (according to their level).
Only the person who marked it can change the manager or the participants, or remove the mark. A private project cannot be left without a manager.
A manager-role user (Owner or someone with Technical administration permissions) who is not a member cannot see the project nor link anything to it.

Sharing it with a client

A private project does not open its documents to client contacts through the portal, and its name does not appear there.

Limits worth knowing

It is private in WorkOS, not in Notion. Anyone with access to your Notion workspace can still see the project and its files there.
Drive: the files of a private project (and those of its tasks) stop being copied to Drive and are kept only in Notion. Anything already in its Drive folder is not deleted and that folder stops syncing; if you want it gone, remove it by hand in Drive. When you remove the private mark, new files are copied again.
Members are registered by their user at the moment you add them. If someone did not yet have a WorkOS account when you added them, save the team again once they do. Adding participants directly in Notion does not give them access to a private project: do it from WorkOS.
If the person who marked it leaves the team, that person cannot be removed while they are the manager or owner of private projects: they must first make them public or reassign them. If they are no longer available, a platform administrator can release them.
If you already consulted the project with Kairos before making it private, that conversation keeps what was read (only you see it).