Set up the work that keeps coming back.

Picture a small team handed a job. Each person does one part, then passes it on.

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 arrange a workflow in the builder — a left-to-right row of stages you lay out yourself. You name the job, add the stages in the order the work flows, and choose which of your agents takes each one.

1. 1

   Name the job

   Give it a human name and a line on what a run should accomplish. That is the whole brief at the top.

2. 2

   Add your stages

   Each stage is one agent. Add them left to right, in the order the work should flow — gather, then draft, then check.

3. 3

   Give each stage its brief

   Open a stage and set its role, a short instruction, which of the agent’s skills are in play, and what it passes forward.

4. 4

   Run it, or schedule it

   Hit Run now to try it end to end, or set a cadence so it runs on its own from then on.

The agents themselves — their voice, their skills, what they are trusted to reach — you shape by talking to 1Presence, not by filling in forms (that is the agents guide). The builder is simply where you line them up into a job.

A stage is the unit of work: one agent, one job. Open any stage and you shape 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.
• An instruction. The stage-specific brief — the way you would tell someone what this one step is for.
• Skills enabled. Tick which of that agent’s skills are in play here. The same agent can do less in one stage, more in another.
• Passes forward. Name what this stage hands on — a file like findings.md, a short result — so the next stage can pick it up.

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.

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

A routine is just the simplest workflow: one agent running on its own cadence — an inbox-keeper that checks your mail each morning. Same machinery, smaller recipe. As your needs grow, a routine becomes a workflow by adding a stage.

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. Before a calendar event: a one-page brief — who is in the room, prior threads, notes from last time — ready before you join.
• Friday Digest. Every Friday: what shipped, what was decided, what is still open, what to mull over the weekend.
• Content Repurposing. When a new post lands in your published folder: variants for each channel, drafted and staged for you to approve.