Flightplan

Concepts

What is Flightplan?

.md

Flightplan holds three things: a workflow is the process you write down once, a checklist is one time you ran it, and a task is one thing to do inside that checklist.

Everything else in the app is a detail of those three.

The three words

A workflow is the plan. "Production deploy." "Pre-drive walkaround." "Quarterly home maintenance." You write it once — the tasks it contains, the order they have to happen in, who each one is for — and then leave it alone. A workflow is never worked directly. It is the thing you make copies of.

A checklist is one of those copies, in progress or finished. Every Monday's walkaround is its own checklist. Every release is its own checklist. Generating one takes a snapshot of the workflow as it stands right then, so the checklist you are halfway through cannot change under you.

A task is one line item: replace the filter, sign off on QA, check the lug torque. It belongs to a checklist, it may be waiting on other tasks, and somebody — or something — closes it.

What that gets you

Because the process is written down separately from any one run of it:

  • The order is enforced, not remembered. A task stays blocked until the tasks before it are done. Nobody has to hold the sequence in their head.
  • You can improve the process without disturbing work in flight. Edit the workflow today; the checklist someone started yesterday still shows yesterday's version.
  • Every checklist leaves a record — who did what, when, and what they answered.

Where things live in the app

The sidebar down the left edge, top to bottom:

Nav item What it is
My work Every open task that is yours, across every checklist. Most people spend the whole day here.
Workflows Every process this organization has written down. Start here to build one, or to generate a checklist from one.
Checklists Every checklist, in progress and finished. Start here to do work.
Schedules The cadences that generate checklists on their own, so nobody has to remember to start one.
Connections Where a task can send its work when it becomes ready, if you have wired one up.

Below those, against the account row, sit What's new and Help. Both are public pages outside the app, so both open in a new tab.

On a phone the sidebar sits behind the menu button, so the page keeps the full width of the screen.

Everything is scoped to your organization. If you belong to more than one, the switcher next to your avatar changes which one you are looking at — workflows and checklists never cross between them.

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