Concepts
Workflows
A workflow is a process your organization repeats, written down once so it can be run the same way every time.
Find them under Workflows in the sidebar. Each card is one process.
What a workflow holds
- A name — what people call it. "Production deploy."
- A key — a short URL-safe slug like
prod-deploy, unique in your organization. You pick it when you create the workflow. - A description — one line about what it is for, shown on the card.
- Tasks — the things to do, laid out on a canvas.
- Prerequisites — which tasks have to wait for which.
- A version — the
v3badge on the card.
The card also shows two counts: how many tasks the workflow contains, and how many checklists have been generated from it so far. To read those checklists, open Checklists and filter the list to this workflow.
A workflow is not something you work
You never tick a box on a workflow. It is a definition. To actually do the work you generate a checklist from it, which makes a fresh copy to work through. The bar at the top of My work does this: pick the workflow, name the checklist, press the mark. See Checklists.
Opening a workflow itself takes you to the builder, because editing it is the only thing there is to do to a definition.
Versions
The v3 badge is the workflow's version. It goes up by one each time someone
presses Publish in the builder.
The version matters for one reason: a checklist records which version it was generated from, and keeps working against that version forever. Publishing v4 does not reach back into a checklist that was generated at v3. See Building a workflow for what Save and Publish each do.
Creating one
New workflow on the Workflows page asks for three things — name, key, description — and then drops you straight into the canvas to lay out the tasks. Walkthrough: Building a workflow.
Running one on a schedule
A workflow does not carry a cadence of its own. Instead you make a schedule — "Monday morning open", every Monday at 9am — and point it at this workflow, and checklists appear without anyone pressing Generate checklist.
One schedule can run several workflows, which is usually what a recurring event actually is. The Schedules page lists every schedule with the workflows it runs.
Checklists generated before schedules existed still show the cadence they were generated with, as a label on the checklist.