Core concepts
Here's a quick rundown of the key terms and concepts you'll encounter in Flat and in this guide.
An organization is the shared, team-wide account where you and your team members collaborate on your work. It's where you configure app-wide settings like team member roles, integrations, and billing details.
Your organization has one or more workspaces, and your workspaces contain topics.
A topic is just a piece of work to be done. You can use topics to represent small deliverables like day-to-day tasks, big goals like "epics" or "milestones", and anything in between.
Every topic has its own page in Flat to house details like a description, attachments, discussion, and more.
If you're coming to Flat from another tool, you might be familiar with a topic being called a "ticket", "issue", "work item", or "card".
A topic's page provides a dedicated place to help your team organize and collaborate on the work, including:
- Ownership: Designate a single topic owner to make that person clearly accountable for the work. Optionally, add additional collaborators so they know the topic's on their plate too.
- Labels: Add labels to categorize or decorate your topics and make it easier for your teammates to find and understand them.
- Checklists: Use lightweight checklists to quickly break down a topic into simple tasks without having to create extra topics. Checklists items can also point to other topics to create flexible hierarchies.
- Discussion: Discussion threads let you have multiple conversations related to the topic going on in parallel. They're assignable, so it's always clear who's accountable for following up, and they're resolvable, so your topics stay uncluttered. Blockers are discussion threads decorated with a brief summary explaining why the topic is stuck.
There are additional, optional features you can enable for your organization too, like topic sizes and due dates.
Every topic belongs to exactly one workspace, where it's displayed as a card.
A workspace houses topics going through the same workflow — the stages that a topic goes through from start until finish. It can be as simple as To do ⇒ In progress ⇒ Done, or as many stages as you like.
A workspace also has its own archive and trash:
- A workspace's archive is where to put topics after they're completed. They still show up in search results, so they're easy to find.
- A workspace's trash is where you can put topics that you don't plan to reference again, like ones created by mistake. They won't appear in search results by default, though you can still view the trash to find them.
Last modified 25d ago