Guides > What are Flows?

In Slipstream, Flows are the running instances of your processes. In Slipstream, we store your processes in Flow Designs, and you can think of these like a family recipe in your company cookbook. Each time you bake the cookies from your family recipe, this would be recorded as a Flow.

With other project management apps, you might be used to creating tasks for all the things happening in your company, and then the actual process of how those tasks are done is more of an afterthought that you could add into descriptions or subtasks if you’d like. Where these might be task-first, instead Slipstream is process-first. In Slipstream, you configure the process, and then you can run multiple copies of that process for each of the tasks that you might be working on for separate customers or concerns.

Don’t worry, processes are really easy to change by anyone. You can edit the Flow Designs as much as you want, and they will only be available to run once you click on the Publish button. Then, all your new Flows will begin using the new version, and your existing processes will continue using the version that they started with.

So, say if you have a checklist that you’d like to turn into Slipstream, we’d recommend using the AI prompt or manually turning each of the checkboxes into separate steps. You can then select different step types and assign different people for each of these steps if you’d like, or just keep them as basically a checkbox with the Acknowledgement step type. Then, publish the Flow, and then run it with the Run a Flow button in the sidebar, and inside of that Flow is where you’d check off the items in a checklist. No more needing to copy and paste descriptions or subtasks in order to make sure tasks get done the same way every time!

Now, in some cases, your organization may be centered around one giant process. If for instance, it’s an organization to host a yearly conference, you may be tempted to create one giant Flow Design that will span the entire year. In this case, we urge you to keep Flow Designs small, and to put the main concerns in the Playbook, instead. By keeping Flow Designs small, you can keep them useful in case when you can have a volunteer or employee take over a small part of the process while you can focus on the rest. And by putting the overall plan in the Playbook, anyone in your company can get a bird’s eye view of the mission in an easy-to-find and view page. You can view more information about the Playbook in What is the Playbook?.

If you’d like more detailed instructions on how to create your first Flow, you can view Create (and run!) your first Flow for more information.