Your library

Posts is everything you have written: drafts still cooking, finished pieces waiting for a day, and everything you’ve published. Two views of the same library, List and Board, and a filter bar above them: free text, topic, campaign, date, stage, and a switch between Mine and the whole organisation, which adds your colleagues’ finished pieces with a face on each row. In List the stage is a heading; on the Board it is a column, and a card can be dragged from one to the next, with buttons doing the same move from the keyboard. Either way the row opens to the whole text.

A piece the coach wrote for you carries a mark on its row, permanently. The coach conversation behind a piece is not here: it lives with the piece itself, and reopening it brings the whole thread back.

The logistics sit on the row

Topic, channel (where it’s meant to go), campaign and a planned date are chips on the row, so you can set them without opening the piece at all. The planned date on its own is coordination: it puts the piece on the team calendar so colleagues can see the day is taken, and nothing happens when the day arrives. Asking us to publish for you is a separate thing, below.

What the open piece can do

Opening a row shows the whole text and the few things you can do to it from there: a draft can be marked as ready, a ready one sent back to drafts or taken to the send-off, and a piece you marked posted can be corrected with not actually posted. Delete is there too, on your own drafts and ready pieces. It asks first and quotes what would go, and it takes the coach conversation behind the piece with it, so there is nothing left to reopen. A scheduled piece cannot be deleted until you call the schedule off, and a piece you have published stays: the way out of that one is to correct it first.

Publishing, three ways

When a piece is ready you get the send-off, and it offers three roads.

Copy text, then It’s posted, is the honest one that needs nothing connected: you publish wherever you publish and tell us it happened. If you have connected your LinkedIn profile in Settings, Post to LinkedIn publishes it from here, the moment you press the button. And Schedule it asks for a day and a time, and then we post it for you at that time, in your own time zone, with you nowhere near it.

What a scheduled piece does while it waits

It sits in Ready with a clock on it and the time it goes out, and the filter bar can narrow to just those. Two things about it are deliberate:

• It is locked. While a piece is scheduled you cannot change its words, its topic, its day or its stage, and you cannot delete it. Whatever the schedule publishes is what you last saw, and half an edit going out is worse than an edit refused. Call it off unlocks it and leaves the date behind as a plan.
• It tells you if it does not go out. If your LinkedIn connection has run out, or LinkedIn refuses the post three times, the piece comes back to Ready with your words exactly as you left them, and you get a note saying which of those happened and what to do. Nothing is published quietly and nothing fails quietly.

One case we will not guess about: if the post reaches LinkedIn and we never hear back, we say so rather than sending it again, because publishing twice is the one thing nobody can undo. The note asks you to look at your profile.