Set up the work that keeps coming back.

That is a workflow: a named recipe of stages, each one an agent of yours doing a single job and handing what it made to the next. First the researcher gathers, then the drafter writes, then the editor checks, then it lands in your vault. It reads like a recipe — first this, then that — not a flowchart. There are no arrows to draw and no logic to wire.

The agents guide is about hiring the specialists. This one is about giving them a shared job that repeats — so the Monday brief, the triaged inbox, the meeting prep just happen.

You build a workflow by describing it. Say what the job is, roughly who does what, and when it should run, and 1Presence shapes it into named stages — each with its agent, its brief and a one-line summary — and shows you the row. The builder is where you then see those stages laid out left to right, drag one into a different order, add or remove one, swap the agent on a stage, and set the schedule.

The agents themselves — their voice, their skills, what they are trusted to reach — you shape by talking to 1Presence too, not by filling in forms (that is the agents guide). Describing builds the recipe; the builder is where you rearrange the pieces.

A stage is the unit of work: one agent, one job. Open any stage and you find a handful of plain things.

• The agent. Which specialist runs this stage.
• Its role. A few words — gather inputs, write the brief, check the facts.
• A one-line summary. The sentence on the stage’s card — writes next week’s briefs from the research summary, and flags anything that can’t be drafted yet. Written when the stage is built and refreshed whenever the brief changes, so the row of cards always describes what runs.
• An instruction. The stage-specific brief — the way you would tell someone what this one step is for.
• Skills in play. The agent’s own skills come with it. A stage can add ones the agent does not usually carry, for this step alone.
• Passes forward. Name what this stage hands on — a file like findings.md, a short result — so the next stage can pick it up.

The written parts — the brief, the summary — are changed by asking. Every stage carries a dark Edit Stage button with Presence’s own mark on it, which means Presence writes this. Press it and a conversation opens that greets you with the stage itself and already holds its current brief; say what should change, and brief and summary come back rewritten together. The Just ask guide explains why the machinery is edited this way.

Handoffs: how one stage feeds the next

When a stage finishes, what it produced — the files it wrote, the things it remembered, anything it passes forward — becomes the next stage’s starting material. The drafter opens its turn already holding the researcher’s findings. You never wire the connection by hand; finishing the stage is the handoff.

Running stages side by side

Stages usually run one after another. But when two do not depend on each other — scanning your email and scanning your calendar, say — mark them to run in parallel at the same step and they go at once. The stage after them waits for both to finish before it starts.

A workflow can run on demand — you tap Run now whenever you want it — or on a schedule you set: daily, weekly (pick the days), or monthly, at a time in your own timezone. A preview tells you exactly when it will next fire before you save. Pause schedule holds the cadence without forgetting it; Resume schedule brings it back on the same rhythm.

After that it runs on its own. Most of the time you simply find the result already waiting — a note in your vault, a dashboard refreshed, a card in your 1Presence inbox — and if a stage needs you, it pauses and asks rather than guessing. See how runs and the inbox work.

A routine is the simplest kind of scheduled job: one agent running on its own cadence — an inbox-keeper that checks your mail each morning. It is deliberately its own small thing, set up on its own screen. When a job wants stages — a gather, then a draft, then a check — build a workflow instead. The routines guide.

Some workflows arrive ready-made. Install the Morning & Inbox Kit and its Morning replies workflow comes with it, agents assigned and schedule set; Meetings & Actions and Support Desk & Calls each ship one too. Everything a Kit installs is yours to reshape like anything you described yourself.

Good first workflows tend to be the things you already do by hand every week:

• Monday Morning Brief. Every Monday at 7am: a researcher pulls the week’s calendar and context, an inbox-keeper flags anything urgent from the weekend, and it all lands as one brief in your vault.
• Inbox Triage. Each weekday: sort the overnight email, set the noise aside, surface what needs you, and draft replies to the routine ones for your review.
• Pre-meeting Prep. Each morning, for the day’s meetings: a one-page brief per meeting — who is in the room, prior threads, notes from last time — ready before the first one starts.
• Friday Digest. Every Friday: what shipped, what was decided, what is still open, what to mull over the weekend.
• Content Repurposing. Every Friday, for anything new in your published folder: variants for each channel, drafted and staged for you to approve.