This article is part of a series on scheduling Workflows:

It is strongly recommended to read these in order, as they build in complexity, and later articles refer back to earlier ones.

Click below to jump to the relevant section:

Within a Workflow Template, the easiest way to schedule when steps happen is by using the timings in the step details. For example, do the kick-off call on day 2, and hold the first set-up meeting on day 7.

You can combine step timings with dependencies and conditions (described in later articles in this series), but firstly, here in this article we'll look at simple timings by themselves, so the number of days specified starts counting when the Workflow Template is applied to a Company or End User (as then all steps are activated together).

This is what simple timings for email steps in a Sequence Workflow Template can look like:

Click on the image to view it enlarged

Considering task steps in a Project Workflow Template, simple step timings look like this:

When a Workflow Template is applied to a specific Company or End User and the steps are activated, the actual dates are filled in - so if we take the Project example we just saw:

The date the Workflow Template is applied is day 0, so if you have a step due for day 7 in the Template, and apply the Workflow to a Company on 1st January, the due date will be 8th January (as in, 7 days after 1st January).

Remember, here we’re just looking at time-based rules in isolation. In the basic examples above, each of the steps are all aligned fully to the left in the step list, so the steps are independent of each other. This means that if one of the steps is completed late, it doesn't affect the dates of the other steps, and indeed the steps don’t actually have to be listed in the order they are scheduled to occur. It's possible to make a step a child of another (a dependent step), and/or apply rule-based conditions, and these would influence the timings - we'll go over dependent steps and conditions later in this article series.

Your Workflow will consist of multiple steps (actions), but you typically don't want all the steps to happen at once. Setting step timings is a really simple way for you to control when actions occur.

For example, perhaps you're creating an onboarding Project, which includes a series of meetings with a Company scheduled over several weeks; or maybe you're re-engaging with low adoption End Users via an email "drip campaign" Sequence, where you want to send emails spaced out every few days.

By specifying on each step what the timings should be, you can very easily state in a Project that you want the first training session to be 7 days after the Workflow Template is applied, and the next training session should be 14 days after the Workflow Template is applied. Or if you're sending a series of emails in a Sequence to inform new End Users about various features of your product, you can set the first email to be sent as soon as possible after the Workflow Template is applied, and then the next email to be sent 2 days after it's applied, and so on.

Here we've talked through some simple examples, but in other cases, you might want a step to occur a certain number of days after the previous step happened (e.g. sending an automated follow-up email after a meeting takes place) or after a rule-based condition has been met (e.g. emailing instructions of next steps only after the End User has taken a specific action such as logging in) - you can do this by combining step timings with dependencies and rule-based conditions, which we'll discuss later in this article series.

You set these timings in the step details, and the options vary slightly depending on whether it's a task step or an email step.

Now you know all about simple step timings, let's add in the next layer of complexity: step dependencies.