Workspaces

A workspace is a self-contained place to do one body of work. It has its own files, its own chat history, and its own settings — all kept apart from your other workspaces.

You might keep one workspace for a quarterly report, another for a recurring client, and a third for personal admin. Each stays tidy and focused, with nothing from the others mixed in.

Adding a workspace

Open the workspace switcher — tap your workspace name at the top of the sidebar — and choose New workspace. A short setup walks you through a few choices:

• Personal or Work — which kind of workspace this is. If you pick Work, it also asks your role, so it can tailor the setup to how you work.
• A template — a ready-made set of starter folders and files for a common kind of work, such as Personal Finance, Side Project, or Engineering Team. Or pick Custom to describe what you need in your own words and let the assistant set it up.
• A name — what to call it. You can change this later.

The assistant then creates the workspace with its starter structure, and you land in it ready to work.

What lives inside a workspace

Each workspace holds three things that belong to it and it alone:

• Files — the documents, spreadsheets, and other work your Plank assistant creates and edits for that workspace.
• Chats — your conversation history with the assistant, including everything it has done for you in that workspace.
• Settings — workspace-specific preferences, such as which model and integrations that workspace uses.

When you're in a workspace, that's the only set of files and chats you see. It's a clean desk every time.

Switching between workspaces

You move between workspaces using the workspace switcher. Switching is quick, and you can do it as often as you like.

When you switch, three things happen:

The switch happens behind the scenes — your Plank assistant simply re-points itself at the workspace you chose.

How to organize your work into workspaces

A good rule of thumb: keep one self-contained area of life or work in each workspace. That keeps every space focused and gives the assistant clean, relevant context to work from — rather than one crowded space where unrelated jobs blur together.

In practice, people tend to split along the natural lines of their work and life. You might keep a separate workspace for each project or client, and standalone workspaces for areas like Health, Planning, Personal finance, and a Journal.

When a space starts mixing unrelated things, that's the sign to split it up: create another workspace for the separate body of work (see Adding a workspace above). If a few files belong in the new space, move them using the file tree's Move to…, which can send a file to another workspace.

Once you have several related workspaces, you can group them into a context — a named set the assistant can focus on all at once. For example, a Work context over your project spaces, and a Personal context over health, planning, and your journal. Contexts are part of the General agent & contexts beta feature you turn on under Settings → Preferences → Beta features; see Contexts.

What's shared, what's separate

It helps to think of it as one assistant working across several separate desks.

Your assistant and your account follow you everywhere. The files, chats, and settings stay with the workspace they belong to.

Your other work is preserved, not lost

Switching away from a workspace never deletes anything. When the chat list narrows to the workspace you've moved into, the conversations from your other workspaces aren't gone — they're simply hidden until you switch back.

Move from Workspace A to Workspace B and A's chat history disappears from view. Move back to A later and it's all there again, exactly as you left it. The same is true of every workspace's files.

So you can switch freely and often without worrying about losing your place in anything.

One conversation in progress at a time

Your Plank assistant works on one chat at a time. If you've asked it to do something in one workspace and it's still working, switching to another workspace doesn't start a second job running alongside it.

Instead, the assistant finishes (or you cancel) the task already underway, and then it's ready to pick up in the workspace you've moved to. This keeps its attention on one thing at a time — the way a dependable colleague would handle your requests in order rather than juggling everything at once.

In practice, if you switch mid-task and try to send a new request straight away, you may be asked to wait a moment until the current one wraps up. Once it does, your new workspace is ready to go.