What a workflow is

Your inbox carries the same kinds of email over and over, and the same jobs come up every time one lands: copy the order into the spreadsheet, forward the file to the supplier, send the reminder the week before the class. A workflow is one of those jobs, described once, in a sentence — the way you'd brief a person on their first day. From then on Dustav does the job as the mail arrives, and you see the result instead of doing the work.

There's no builder, no form, no field mapper. You say what you want in chat, on any tab; Dustav asks the one or two questions that matter, writes the rule, and it's live. The Workflows tab is where every rule lives afterwards: one card each, saying when it fires and what it produces, opening into the full spec and everything it has done.

Every workflow answers the same three questions

Whatever the job, a workflow is when → do → produced:

• When does it fire? A known sender's email ("the Square receipt"), a kind of email Dustav recognises on sight ("someone asking about a commission"), an email you send ("when I send a new client their welcome"), a send of yours that got no reply ("three quiet days after a quote"), or a time ("every morning at 7").
• Do what? Save the email's facts as a row in a table, prepare an outbound email, draft from one of your templates, or draft a nudge on your own thread.
• Produced what, so far? The rows in the table, the drafts waiting in Drafts, the mornings it has run, the sends it's watching.

The card on the Workflows tab is those three questions answered in three rows. If you can say the sentence, you can make the workflow.

The four shapes

Dustav sorts workflows into four shapes, each with its own colour on the tab. Pick by what you want to end up with.

You want…	Shape	Example sentence
A table you can search, count, and export	Table	"Every class registration: save the student, the class, the date, and what they paid."
An email drafted for you when a situation shows up	Email	"When a customer sends a file for the print shop, draft the forward to the shop with the file attached."
An email drafted on a schedule, from your own words	Schedule	"Every morning at 7, anyone whose class is tomorrow gets the reminder, with the checklist attached."
A nudge when something you sent gets no reply	Follow-up	"Three days after I send a quote with no reply, draft a friendly nudge — twice at most."

Each has its own page: Table workflows, Email workflows, Schedule workflows, Follow-ups. The rule of thumb:

• If the job is "stop me retyping this," it's a Table.
• If the job is "every time X happens, I write the same email," it's an Email workflow — and if the words are always the same, they belong in a template.
• If the job is "the day before / the week after / every Monday," it's a Schedule.
• If the job is "if they don't answer, chase them," it's a Follow-up.

Mail that arrives, or mail you send

A Table or Email workflow fires on one side, and only that side. Most fire on mail arriving — a customer writes in, a receipt lands. Some fire on mail you send: Dustav reads each message you send right after it goes out, so "log every quote I email a customer" is a Table on your sent mail, and "when I send a new member their welcome, draft them the discount code" is an Email workflow on your sent mail. A Follow-up is always about something you sent. Say it the way you'd say it — "when I send…" is the sent side — and Dustav sets the side for you.

What a workflow is not

Dustav keeps four kinds of things, and each has one home. Knowing which is which is most of knowing workflows:

• A fact is something Dustav knows — your supplier's address, your return policy, that Thursdays are your day off. Facts don't run. A workflow can lean on a fact ("draft the forward to the supplier" uses the address you told it), but the process itself is the workflow.
• A document is something the business keeps — a price list, a policy, a class description, your real checklist PDF. Documents don't run either; they're consulted and attached.
• A template is words you send over and over — a subject, a body, and the documents that always go with it. A template never sends itself; a workflow points at it and says when.
• A workflow is a job that runs — the only one of the four that does anything on its own.

So: "remember that Northwind is our clay supplier" is a fact. "Keep our studio policies somewhere I can attach them" is a document. "This is the exact email we send when a piece is ready for pickup" is a template. "When the kiln log says a batch is done, draft the pickup email to everyone in that batch" is a workflow that uses all three.

What it never does

Every email a workflow prepares lands in Drafts and waits for your click. Nothing a workflow does sends on its own, and nothing spends money you can't see: every email it reads is one metered read, shown on Usage like everything else. A workflow also never writes a row from memory — rows come only from reading a real email. Those two fences are in code, not in the fine print; the trust page has the full list.

A workflow starts from the day you make it. A Table can catch up on older mail with a backfill; the other three can't — a backfill fills rows and never drafts an email, because a draft for something that happened months ago would be stale. If you want the old cases covered, ask Dustav to draft them in chat, one at a time.

Where to go next

• New to this: read Making a workflow, which walks through one from the first sentence to the first rows, including the two ways a new rule usually goes wrong and the one-line fix for each.
• Looking for ideas: the examples page is a list of sentences you could say today.