Your first project
A complete worked example. Follow it with your own subject substituted and you will have a project that holds its own research, an organised canvas, and a first draft grounded in both.
The scenario
Suppose you are assessing whether to enter a new market. You have a fortnight, a handful of half-read reports, and no clear structure yet. This is the shape of problem PlansFlow is built for: too much material to hold in your head, not enough to be obvious.
Step 1 — Name the project
Describe what you are starting in one sentence. The sentence becomes the project's standing context, so make it specific about subject and outcome.
Example
Assess the opportunity for a mid-market CRM in the
Nordics, and produce a go/no-go brief by the 30th.Step 2 — Gather before you organise
Resist structuring too early. Run three or four research queries and drop in whatever documents you already have. Each answer lands as a block with its sources attached; each file becomes material the project can read.
You are looking for enough material that patterns start to show. Twenty loose blocks is a better starting point than four tidy ones.
Step 3 — Let the shape emerge
Now arrange. Drag related blocks together, and connect the ones that genuinely depend on each other. Groups that form naturally are usually the sections of your eventual output.
If two clusters keep pulling apart, that is information. It often means you are actually working on two projects.
Step 4 — Move it onto a board
Once the questions are clear, put them on a board: open question, researching, decided, done. Each card keeps the blocks behind it, so a decision can always be traced back to what informed it.
Step 5 — Draft from what you have
Select the clusters that matter and generate. Because the context is explicit, the draft cites the material you chose, and you can regenerate tomorrow with the same selection and get a comparable result.
Something unclear or missing? Write to support@plansflow.com.