The board overview
Open the app and you land on the board overview: every campaign in your workspace, as a grid of boards or a compact list, sorted the way you left it. Board labels ("Q3", "Always-on", a client name) group and filter the gallery. They organize whole boards and leave the cards inside untouched.
When a campaign wraps, archive its board. It leaves the gallery for a quiet Archive shelf at the foot of the page. Nothing is deleted: the board still opens, and your agent can still read it. Restore it anytime from the shelf's row menu. The shelf only appears once something is archived.
Running the same play twice? Duplicate a board from its gallery menu and start the next round from the last one. The copy is a new active board, so it counts against your plan's board cap like any other.
Creating a board
New board offers two starts: a blank canvas, or a playbook. The playbook picker is worth a look even if you plan to start blank. Each playbook shows a pannable preview of the actual board you'll get, phase columns and starter cards included, so you can see what you're picking. A board created from a playbook also arrives with its program: the board header says which step the campaign is on, and each step carries a prompt to copy. What a playbook really teaches your agent is covered in Playbooks.
The canvas
The canvas is where the campaign takes shape, and you move through it like a map: zoom, pan, a minimap for orientation, fit-to-screen to bring the whole campaign into view. The spatial layout is the point. A campaign drawn as a graph is legible in a way a folder of documents never is: you can see that an email traces back to an audience, which traces back to an insight from research.
Phases
A phase is a movable region on the canvas, one stage of the campaign. The Ecommerce campaign playbook ships six: Research → Audience → Strategy → Create → Launch → Measure. They're yours to shape: rename them, resize them, drag them where they make sense. Each phase carries an icon, and can take an accent color when one stage deserves to stand out.
Your agent works with phases too: it can add a phase and arrange them on the canvas. Two edits are reserved for you by design, deleting a phase and reordering phases. Both restructure the campaign, and that stays a human call.
Two edit modes
A board has two edit modes, and exactly one kind of thing responds at a time:
- Cards mode
- Cards select, move, and link. Phase regions sit still.
- Connections & layout mode
- Phases move, resize, and connect, and you can draw arrows. Cards sit still.
That's what keeps a dense board calm: dragging a card near a phase edge always does one predictable thing.
Focus view
When one stage needs your attention, switch to focus view: the chosen phase stays bright, everything around it dims, and a navigator strip along the bottom steps you from phase to phase. It's how you review Create card by card without losing the campaign around it.
Cards belong to phases
Drop a card inside a phase region and it belongs to that phase; membership follows placement. Cards stay freely movable either way. Your agent sets the same membership explicitly when it files its own work into the right stage.
Auto-arrange
After a long agent session, a board can get messy. Auto-arrange is one click: phases snap into a clean row, and every card slots into reading order inside its phase. It's a full reset of the layout, so it sits behind a confirm. One thing it leaves alone: cards that don't belong to any phase stay exactly where you put them.
Phase connections
Phases connect with typed arrows: precedes (Create precedes Launch), informs, and feeds (Research feeds Strategy). Draw them in Connections & layout mode. These arrows are the campaign flow your agent reasons over when it decides what to work on next.
Embedded boards
A phase can embed another board. The classic use: one shared brand-research board, embedded into every campaign board that needs it, so campaigns stop re-deriving the same research. Your agent reads the embedded board's contents as part of reading the host board, with no extra step. Setting or changing an embed is a human decision by design, and embedding goes one level deep.
The schedule
Campaigns run on dates, and a board can carry them. Give the board a launch day in Board settings, and give any card a timing: a fixed date, a date range, or an offset from launch ("T-14" is two weeks before). Then turn an empty phase into a schedule: it renders every timed card on the board in chronological order, so the plan reads as a timeline without leaving the canvas. Your agent can set all of this, and it reads the same timeline back when it plans what to do next.
Two things a timing never does. It never moves a card's status, and nothing sends or fires because a date arrives: the schedule is information, never a trigger. And moving the launch day never rewrites the cards; an offset like T-14 simply resolves against the new date.
Board summary & guidance
Every board carries two pieces of text your agent reads before anything else on a fresh session. The summary says what this campaign is and where it stands; the guidance holds standing instructions for how to work on this board, usually pinned from the playbook. The summary is a shared responsibility: you and your agent keep it current. A well-kept summary is what makes picking up a weeks-old campaign take seconds.
Tidy my "Summer sale" board in Plainpaper: auto-arrange it so the layout is clean, then update the board summary in three sentences covering what this campaign is, what's finished, and what should happen next.
The Brief
At the bottom edge of the canvas sits a folder tab marked Brief. Pull it up and the board's dossier opens: the playbook and its method, the state of play (the board summary), the brand guidelines, the enabled tools, and your own notes, gathered on one sheet. It's everything your agent reads before it writes, readable by you in the same place. Editing still happens in Board settings and the other views; the Brief links to each one.
Housekeeping
The small stuff lives where you'd expect. Right-click a card, a phase, or an arrow for its context menu: open, comment, edit, delete. The board rail on the left holds the rest: the two edit modes, add (new card or new phase), auto-arrange, board activity, board settings, share, and comments, with a badge that counts the ones still open.
No Save button, no Send button, on purpose. Boards autosave, so Save would promise nothing. And Plainpaper never sends emails or publishes ads: your agent hands approved work to each platform through that platform's own connection, and only after your approval.
Related
- The playbook library: boards with their phases and starter cards already in place.