Whiteboards

A whiteboard is an open canvas for the thinking that doesn't fit in a list — sketching an idea, mapping how pieces connect, or pinning notes where you can see them all at once. This article covers where whiteboards live, what the tools do, and how a drawing can link back to the rest of your work.

Where whiteboards live

There are three separate surfaces, and it's worth knowing all three exist because they're easy to miss:

• Your personal whiteboard — the Whiteboard tab in the main navigation. It belongs to you, not to any project.
• A whiteboard on any project — open a project and switch to its whiteboard. Trips are projects, so trips have one too.
• Day Canvas — a sketchboard attached to a single day in the planner. Open a day in the daily view and draw on it. Days that have a canvas are marked in the month view, so you can see at a glance which ones you sketched on.

Day Canvas is deliberately simpler than the other two — see Day Canvas below.

Tools

• Pen and highlighter — freehand ink in five stroke widths, with an eraser.
• Text — pick the text tool, tap where you want it, and type in place.
• Sticky notes — the original whiteboard object, still here alongside everything else.
• Shapes — flowchart shapes you place and resize.
• Connectors — drag from the edge of one shape to another. The connection is to the shape, not to a point in space, so moving a shape drags its connectors with it.
• Images, links, and documents — drop them onto the canvas as objects.

For tidy diagrams there's snap-to-grid, alignment guides, and align/distribute, plus duplicate. Selecting an object shows only the controls that apply to it, so the palette changes as you work.

On desktop, scroll pans the canvas and Cmd/Ctrl+scroll zooms. On touch, press and hold opens the context menu. The canvas grows as you work — it extends in every direction rather than stopping at an edge.

Mind maps

The Mind Map preset starts you with a central node and branches instead of a blank canvas. Branch colors are editable: right-click a node, choose Branch color, and the whole leg recolors.

Pages and boards

A whiteboard can hold multiple pages, switched by tab — useful for keeping several diagrams in one project without them crowding each other. Each page can hold multiple sticky-note boards. Each page also remembers its own zoom and position, so returning to a page puts you back where you were, and each page can carry its own background photo.

On the free plan you get one page per whiteboard, and one board per page. Everything else on this list — ink, shapes, connectors, mind maps, Day Canvas — is free. Adding a second page or board prompts to upgrade.

Day Canvas

Day Canvas is the same drawing surface scoped to one day, and it's intentionally pared back: ink and text, plus images, links, and documents. Shapes, connectors, mind maps, and sticky-note boards are not part of it — those live on the personal and project whiteboards.

A day's canvas picks up that day's background photo, and it opens full screen when you want room to work. A page is only created when you actually draw something, and an empty one is cleaned up rather than left behind.

AI diagrams

Ask Focal Point can build a diagram for you — describe a process or a structure in chat and the assistant lays out the nodes and connections on a whiteboard. It can also read a whiteboard back, so you can ask about one you've already drawn. The assistant is a Premium feature; drawing your own diagrams by hand is not.

Diagrams also round-trip as Mermaid text. Paste Mermaid in through Insert Mermaid Diagram to have it drawn, or export a board back out as Mermaid to use elsewhere.

Linking a drawing to your work

A shape on a canvas can point at something real. Linked shapes carry a small link badge, so a diagram tells you which of its boxes have work behind them and which are still just boxes.

• Tasks and notes — link a node to an existing task or note, and the link is visible from both ends.
• Requirements — on a project with requirements tracking turned on, you can add a new requirement or link an existing one straight from a node, which is how a process diagram becomes traceable.

Sharing and export

A project's whiteboard is shared with the project, so collaborators on that project see it. Your personal whiteboard is yours alone. Boards import and export from the … menu.