What is a social media content planner?
A social media content planner is the workspace where ideas, briefs, research, and campaign notes live before they reach the publishing calendar. It usually holds owners, due dates, status, and rough dates. Workbench is Maeve's version, kept in the same workspace as the drafts so the plan and the schedule don't disagree.
What does the Workbench actually do?
The Workbench is a planning workspace built from four section types: notepads for raw thinking, research notes for sources and media, planning tables for spreadsheet-style rows, and series builders for ordered launches. A page can stack them in any order, with one planning table per page. Every planning row is a real draft, and the row mirrors its live status, dates, and assignees.
How is this different from planning in Notion or a Google Sheet?
Notion and Google Sheets are fine for planning, but they don't publish. The handover is where things drift: the sheet says one thing, the scheduler says another. In Workbench, every planning row is a real draft, so its Status, Date Scheduled, Date Posted, and Assignees read from the post itself.
What does the planning table do?
It's the spreadsheet shape inside the workspace. Default columns are Title, Status, Date Scheduled, Date Posted, and Assignees. You can add custom text, select, multi-select, checkbox, date, and person columns. Sort, filter, and every row keeps mirroring its live post.
Can I edit captions in the table cells?
Captions live on the post, not in the table. A table cell is the wrong shape for per-platform caption work, so the composer handles the caption and the table handles the columns around it. Open the row's draft to write the caption and any per-platform overrides.
How does a planning row turn into a real post?
It already is one. Adding a row creates a real draft in the workspace, starting at the Idea stage. The title you type in the table writes back to the post, and opening the row opens the full draft, where the captions, media, platforms, and scheduling live.
Does editing a row's status update the linked draft?
Not yet. The mirror runs draft to row only, with one exception: the title column writes back to the post. The schedule is the source of truth, so the calendar and Board are where status moves through Idea, In Progress, Review, Approved, Scheduled, and Published. The planning row reflects whatever the draft says; to change status, open the draft from the row.
What's the Series Builder for?
A series is for ideas that need to ship in order: a launch week, a tutorial run, a carousel rollout, a recurring weekly slot. The container holds a title, theme, and goal. Inside, child posts carry platforms, formats, captions, priority, due date, assignees, labels, and pillars. Drag children into the order they should ship.
How does research stay separate from drafts?
Research notes live in their own section and don't pretend to be posts. Each note can carry body text, URLs, a media gallery, priority, a due date, assignees, a campaign, labels, and an activity log. Every note has a status, To do, Doing, Done, or Archived, so a stuck note surfaces at a glance.
Can I add custom columns for pillars, formats, and priority?
Add a select column for any of those. Select options carry custom colors so the table reads at a glance. Custom columns are row-only metadata used for sort and filter; the post itself reads pillars and formats from the workspace taxonomy when you open the draft. If those pillars are still up in the air, here is how to build a content pillar strategy first.
Does it work for one person, or only teams?
Both. A solo creator runs the planning table as a personal content queue and skips the assignees and approval status columns. A team adds owners, due dates, and the Review/Approved status values, and the activity log gives each item a paper trail.
Where does the rest of the schedule live?
Workbench is the planning surface. A row's draft is a normal post in the workspace, so the same post can sit on the calendar (date-first), move through the Board (workflow-first), and open in the composer (caption-first). Switching surfaces doesn't duplicate the post; it shows the same draft in the shape that fits the job.
Can I save a series as a template to reuse?
Not yet. Each series is built from scratch, and there's no clone-from-template or recurring series. The workaround for repeating formats is to keep a series container around as a planning shell and copy its child posts into a fresh draft when each round comes up.