Why guides exist

Every team runs on knowledge that lives in one or two people's heads. How to clean the coffee machine without flooding the drip tray. The exact order for opening the shop. What to say when a customer asks for a refund you can't give. When those people are off, the knowledge is off with them — and the new hire learns by getting it wrong first.

Guides fix that. A guide is a short, reusable set of instructions you write once and attach to the tasks where it's actually needed. The person doing the job sees a View Guide button right on the task, opens it, and follows along — without leaving what they're doing.

Creating your first guide

Open the Guides section in your space and tap New guide. You'll need two things to start:

  • A title — short and literal. "Clean the espresso machine," not "Machine stuff."
  • A short description (optional) — one line so people can tell guides apart in the library.

Then write the body. The editor supports the formatting that actually matters for instructions:

  • Headings to break a long procedure into stages.
  • Numbered steps for anything that has to happen in order.
  • Bullet lists for checklists where order doesn't matter.
  • Bold and italic to flag the step everyone skips.

Keep steps to one action each. "Remove the portafilter and knock out the puck" is two steps, and someone will do one and forget the other.

Adding a video

Some things are faster to show than to describe. Paste a YouTube or Vimeo link into the editor and it embeds inline as a thumbnail with a play button — no uploading, no file management. A 40-second clip of the backflush routine saves you a paragraph and a half of careful wording.

If you paste a link that isn't a supported video, the editor tells you and simply doesn't add it — your guide is never left in a broken state.

Attaching a guide to tasks

A guide on its own is just a document. The point is to put it where the work happens.

Attach a guide to a recurring task — "Open the shop," "Friday deep clean" — and the View Guide button appears on every future instance of that task automatically. One guide can cover many tasks, and one task can carry several guides. You can also attach guides while you're creating a task, so the instructions and the job go live together.

If you later delete a guide, the tasks it was attached to simply lose the link. Nothing breaks.

Draft vs. published

Not every guide is ready for the team the moment you start it. Save a guide as a draft while you're still writing — drafts are invisible to staff and only owners and managers can see them. When it's ready, hit Publish. Changed your mind, or a procedure changed? Unpublish back to a draft at any time.

Who can do what

  • Owners and managers create, edit, delete, and attach guides.
  • Everyone else reads published guides — in the library and on their tasks.

Try it with your team

Write one guide for the job that always gets done wrong, attach it to that task, and watch the questions stop. Nudge gives you a fair task rotation and the instructions to go with it — free for 7 days.