Guide
Work on a note together
Open a note somebody else is already writing in and you see them at the top, their words arriving as they type, and their cursor moving through the text. One person writes at a time, and the turn is passed by asking.
Before you start
- No special role needed. Anyone who can read a note can open it while somebody else is writing, ask for a turn, and take one when there is nobody there to ask.
- Nothing to switch on and nobody to invite. It happens the moment two people have the same note open.
See who else is here
Nothing announces itself and nothing has to be turned on. The moment a colleague opens the note, three things are true at once.
A circle at the top of the note
A small circle with their initial joins the row at the top, beside Share. Point at it for their name. It is there for as long as they have the note open and gone as soon as they close it. On your own there is nothing there at all, so a circle appearing means something every time.
Their colour is their cursor
Each person gets a colour, and their circle at the top and their cursor down in the text are the same one. A second cursor arriving in the middle of a paragraph is never a mystery: look up, and the circle in that colour tells you whose it is.
Their words, as they type them
Whoever is writing, their sentences arrive in your copy as they type rather than when they stop or when the note saves. You can scroll wherever you like while they work: watching them does not drag your view around.
Take a turn at writing
One person writes at a time
Whoever opened the note first is the one writing. Everybody else has it open to read: you can scroll it and watch it change, and you cannot type in it. The row at the top names the person who is writing.
That is deliberate rather than a limitation of the moment. Two people typing into the same paragraph is a different feature, and this one exists so that neither of you loses a sentence to the other.
Click Ask to edit
The button beside their name asks them for the note. They see your name and the words wants to edit at the top of their own copy, with two buttons beside it: Give control and Keep writing.
They answer, or the clock does
The moment you ask, your button changes to Waiting with their name on it and stops being clickable. A request that was sent should never look like a click that did nothing.
Give control saves what they have written first and then passes the turn. You become the person writing, they drop to reading, and the note keeps a version of where they got to, so nothing they typed is left behind in the handover.
Keep writing says so rather than leaving you guessing: the line beside their name tells you they are still writing and that you can ask again, and your button becomes Ask again. Either way you are not stuck. Thirty seconds after you asked it becomes Take over, and if they are typing at that moment the line says that too, so you are never interrupting somebody blind.
Take over straight away when they have gone
If the person who was writing has closed the note or left, there is nobody to ask and the button says Take over from the start rather than after a wait. Click it and the note is yours to write in.
This is what makes sure a note can never end up locked by somebody who went home. There is no lock to clear and no administrator to fetch.
Nothing is overwritten, even when this goes wrong
Taking turns is the courtesy. The guarantee underneath it is the one that was already there: if two saves ever collide, the second one stops rather than writing over the first.
So a dropped connection, a laptop waking up on a note it no longer holds, or a genuine race between two people cannot cost anybody a paragraph. The note says Not saved, keeps your text on screen, and offers Copy my version and Reload this note. See Write a note for what that banner does.
Good to know
This is per note. Two people in two different notes never see each other, and nobody is told which notes you have open, only that you are in this one.
Closing the note, or the tab, gives the turn up. There is nothing to hand back before you leave.
Every time the turn changes hands, WorkWiser keeps a version of the note. See Version history to read those, or to put one back.
An archived note is read-only for everybody, so none of this appears on one. Restore it first and it behaves like any other note again.
Ready to see it on your own work?
WorkWiser is in early access. Tell us where to reach you and we will send an invite when it is your turn.