WorkFlowy

You want an invoice? We'll give you an invoice.

Wed, 15 May 2013 16:02:17 -0700

In another amazing feat of technological genius, WorkFlowy now provides invoices for WorkFlowy Pro users. If you’re a paying user, you can visit https://workflowy.com/invoices (you must be logged in) and you’ll see a printable list of invoices for all the charges we’ve ever made to your card.

We know, we know. Millions of people have been waiting for this. World leaders have been less effective without it. You’re welcome. No need flood our inboxes with fan mail.

WorkFlowy for Teaching Music

Tue, 07 May 2013 14:11:43 -0700

Paul Wood is a violin teacher who uses WorkFlowy in his day job. He has now started experimenting with WorkFlowy to keep track of lessons and feedback for his students, and he’s blogged about it.

This post is part of a series focusing on how different types of people use WorkFlowy. Do you have an interesting use for WorkFlowy? Blog about it, let us know, and we’ll share it.

Announcing Starred Pages

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 14:23:00 -0700

We are pleased to announce that we’re releasing a big new feature today: Starred Pages.

As your WorkFlowy account gets bigger, you’ll notice it becomes necessary to spend more and more time navigating around it using the zoom feature, or searching for stuff using the search box.

The starred pages feature eliminates this repetition. Whenever you have a particular page that you view often, just click the star in the top right to save it. You can navigate to any starred page at any time by clicking the starred page icon in the top bar (next to the search box) or with keyboard shortcuts.

Starred pages remember both where you’re zoomed (if you are) and what you’re searching for (if you’re searching for anything). So they act as save searches as well.

The video above demonstrates the feature and explains the controls. Try it out!

"Workflowy is the best thing since pen and paper, or rather it’s pen and paper on steroids, the..."

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 10:00:50 -0800

“

Workflowy is the best thing since pen and paper, or rather it’s pen and paper on steroids, the way it should be.

When computers and mobile devices spread, we got many new tools for brainstorming, compiling to-dos and so on. Those tools were somehow better than paper, but also different, so none of us went totally paperless and kept using some notebooks, mostly for brainstorming.

WorkFlowy is different. It adapts naturally to the way our mind is used to working. It does not aim to substitute paper, but sort of improves it. There is room for WorkFlowy to improve, but believe me this is the best organizing tool ever.

~ Tiziano Solignani, Lawyer & Writer

”

- An email to help@workflowy.com

"Thanks so much for the hard work. Mobile offline is a welcome addition to an already outstanding..."

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 08:01:04 -0800

“

Thanks so much for the hard work. Mobile offline is a welcome addition to an already outstanding app.

Love your product and can’t help from telling everyone about it.

You guys are the best.

~Jeffrey

”

- An email to help@workflowy.com

"I love your product so much, and as I continue to use it I see the benefits more and more. I have..."

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 10:00:52 -0800

“

I love your product so much, and as I continue to use it I see the benefits more and more. I have been promoted twice at work since starting to use it…no lie.

~Brandon

”

- An email to help@workflowy.com

WorkFlowy Goes Offline

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 08:00:00 -0800

Oh, happy day! WorkFlowy now works offline on iOS. Here’s the link to the app store, so you can try it out. Other platforms are coming soon. For desktop, it will be a WorkFlowy Pro feature only.

With the new offline functionality, you’ll be able to access your account even when you have no internet connection. Any changes you make while offline will be remembered and synced when you come back online.

This has been in the works for a long time, and took a lot of work. We hope you enjoy it!

"Hey Workflowy peeps. Just need to let you know that WorkFlowy has changed my life. I am typically..."

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 08:00:48 -0800

“

Hey Workflowy peeps.

Just need to let you know that WorkFlowy has changed my life. I am typically a creative, visionary, and idea-filled person. Along with these amazing traits comes unfinished projects, disorganization, and distraction. I have tried a ga-zillion productivity-increasing apps and tools to no avail. That is, until I found WorkFlowy. I am more productive than a rainforest, more organized than an ISTJ! Thanks for creating something so simple and so useful.

-Bola

”

- An email to help@workflowy.com

How I use WorkFlowy: Andrew Carroll

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 08:01:12 -0800

People use WorkFlowy in an insane variety of ways. This guest blog post shows how one interesting person, Andrew Carroll, uses it. Andrew is a CPA, Financial Planner, Business Advisor, and Internet Business Person. We’ll let Andrew take it from here.

I do a lot of things in my life. I mean a WHOLE lot. I am a CPA, so I have about 300 individual and 100 business tax clients and about 20 accounting clients. I also manage money for around 100 people. As the general manager of our firm, I am responsible for strategic company projects like marketing, community involvement, and planning the direction we should be going as a company. I also run CPAAndrew.com where I talk about the financial issues that small business owners face and try to give practical advice to individuals.

As you can imagine, I have a lot of demands on my time. I have been using WorkFlowy for a little over a year now and it is probably tied with Evernote as the most useful tool for productivity and organization I have ever used.

Why WorkFlowy?

I use a GTD-style workflow to help me stay on target and keep organized. How does WorkFlowy help me? Simply put, I use WorkFlowy for the Review, Organize, and Do part of the GTD system. I use Evernote (and email inboxes, to a limited extent) for the collect and process pieces. So what exactly does that mean?

My brain works in list and outline format. Really. Not just, “Hey, I prefer bullet points.” But I honestly have a hard time reading narrative and extracting information. The running joke in my office is that if you don’t give me info in bullet point format, I won’t read it.

But the problem with outlining things is when you outline in something like a text document, and you want to move things around, you end up basically redoing the outline multiple times. When I discovered WorkFlowy, I fell in love.

How do I use it? I think it makes the most sense to explain it in GTD terms, because if I just explain the outline, it might not be clear.

Review

So to start, I use WorkFlowy to Review. At the top level, I have a check list for each different type of review that I do: Annual, Semi-Annual, Quarterly, Monthly, Weekly, and Daily. Each checklist reminds me what to do. Now, obviously my annual review checklist looks MUCH different than my weekly review list or my daily list. But it is simply a list I go through, in the appropriate time frame, to make sure that nothing is missed in my world and that I review every horizon of focus at the appropriate time.

I also have quasi-project sheets at each level for recurring tasks that happen in that interval. I call it the Maintenance Project. So, I have a maintenance project bullet in the Quarterly, Monthly, and Weekly checklists. The Quarterly Maintenance project has things I want to do each and every quarter, like networking with specific people and three-day weekend trips. The Monthly Checklist has a maintenance project that includes things like: date night for my fiancé, Cooking Adventures, and movies I want to see. All things that I want to repeat each month.

Organize

I also use WorkFlowy to Organize. In GTD, we keep track of tasks and projects. Projects are any outcome that requires more than two actions to accomplish it. We keep track of all the actions that are needed on a project sheet. I use WorkFlowy for my project sheets.

I break it down in a couple ways. The first level is only three entries: Client List, Business Path, and Personal Path. Client list is pretty self-explanatory, but below client list I have about 6 different types of clients (tax, investment, consulting, prospects, etc.) and under each of those is a line for each client. Under each client is a list of next actions. Boom. Project sheet.

The Path idea is a little more convoluted. I found that I was tracking too many projects. And I was accomplishing nothing because I was trying to move 47 projects forward at once. Then Patrick Rhone inspired me to “burn a hole” so I decided to condense the focus and only work on a few projects at a time. Each Path (Personal and Business) has five things under it: Tasks, Two Sub-Paths, Queued Projects, and a Someday/Maybe List.

Tasks is a list of one-off things (not projects) that need to be done. There are obviously two lists: one under the Personal Path for personal tasks and one under the Business Path.

Each Path has two Sub-Paths: Personal has Improvement and Passion. Business has Improvement and CPAAndrew. This means that, I want to have no more than four projects going at any one time. One is focused on improving myself, one is focused on one of my passions (currently it is my Chef’s Kitchen Project). For my business I always have one project focused on improving the business going and an active project for my online persona, CPAAndrew (which is based around my blog CPAAndrew.com ).

Under each of the sub-paths are a list of what I call Queued Projects. These are fully-formed project ideas, with lots of next actions already defined. They are on my schedule to do. As soon as a project from one of the Paths is complete, one of the Queued Projects will move out of the queue and into primary mode. I keep a schedule (which I update Quarterly) of when I expect to work on projects. So I can tell you roughly when any given project in the queue will be worked on. This was the hardest part of this system, letting go of some projects until I can give them my full attention.

The last section under each Path is the Someday/Maybe list. These are sometimes projects (rebuild master closet) and sometimes just one line things (take up archery). But it is the last collection point for everything I want to do. These items are not on my schedule and I have no concrete time frame or even desire to do some of them, which is why they are not in the Queued projects.

Do

The other major thing I do in WorkFlowy, is DO. For doing, I use #hashtags. I love hashtags. Basically I have a few time frame tags: #critical (meaning I need to do it this week), #nextweek, #twoweeks, and #nextmonth, all of which are self-explanatory. During my weekly review I do a search for #critical items first and make sure they all still need to be done this week.

Then I do the #nextweek tag to see if anything needs to be moved to critical or if it can still be done next week, then I continue on down the line. After that, I rerun the #critical search to see what I have to do this week. With that in one screen and my calendar in the other, I start hashtagging tasks by day: #monday, #tuesday, etc. I keep going until everything is assigned to a day. I tag things in my maintenance project on the day I want to do them.

Pro tip: when Monday is full, search: #critical -#monday to take off the Monday tasks, then keep adding days so you can work on filling one day at a time. You would be amazed at home quickly and easily I can create five to-do lists on Sunday night, that are easy to execute during the week.

When I get to work on Monday, the first thing I do is hit Esc then type “#monday” which does a search for things tagged Monday. That then sits on my screen all day as my to-do list for the day. I either delete, complete, or un-tag and re-tag tasks as necessary.

Occasionally I use some other function hashtags like #waitingfor or (during tax season) #return, so I can quickly see how many returns I have in house to do (“Esc #returns -#waitingfor”) or to see how many I have waiting on information (“Esc #return #waitingfor”).

So yeah, I use the sh*t out of WorkFlowy.

We've Temporarily Pulled WorkFlowy from the iOS App Store

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 16:24:00 -0800

Update: WorkFlowy is back in the App Store. Huzzah!!!

The WorkFlowy iPhone and iPad app is not currently available in the iOS app store. We have a new version of the app awaiting approval, and it’ll be back in the store as soon as it is approved.

The reason we pulled the app is this: on Sunday night, we accidentally released a new version of the WorkFlowy iOS app. We hadn’t intended to release that version, because we had found a bug in it. Apple unfortunately has no way of undoing a release, so we had to choose between a buggy app in the app store, and no app in the app store. Not an easy choice, but we chose to remove the app.

We have a fixed app awaiting approval from Apple, and hopefully it will be approved quickly. We were sadly rejected when we asked for expedited review. However, they’ve been really quick about reviewing our app releases lately, so hopefully it will be back in the app store in a matter of days.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Moving on WorkFlowy Mobile

Thu, 15 Nov 2012 14:42:00 -0800

Yep, the rumors are true. You’ve been waiting for this longer than the next Game of Thrones book. The day is finally here: you can move stuff on WorkFlowy mobile.

I know, I know. You are probably crying with joy. You’re having trouble reading this through the tears. Puddles are welling up on your keyboard. You feel a surge of joy and universal love that makes you want to throw your hands toward the sky and scream, “WORLD, I LOVE YOU!!!”.

Well, enough of that. Get it together. You’re embarrassing everybody. Here’s how it works:

Tap and hold an item.
It will pop out
Drag it up and down.

That’s it, enjoy.

P.S. Android users must use the Chrome browser if you want to move things in WorkFlowy. The regular Android browser is too crappy to make stuff like this work. In fact, if you want to be happier, more satisfied and better looking, we recommend you start using Chrome on Android as your default browser for everything.

We Put These Flyers Up

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 10:00:29 -0800

This flyer was put up all around University of Arizona a few weeks ago, by Joe, a WorkFlowy user who is a sophomore there.

Joe had emailed us and said, “How about I put up some flyers for you on my campus?” We liked his enthusiasm, so we made up the flyer and he put it up all over the place. The flyer lead to some new users, which was great, but overall it was just a fun experience for us.

I also did an interview with Joe, because I like doing interviews and thought he sounded like an interesting guy. Parts of it are pretty entertaining, I think. I have him tell a bunch of random stories about his life, and also explain why he wanted to put flyers up for WorkFlowy.

How to Make Reusable Checklists in WorkFlowy

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 12:17:00 -0700

WorkFlowy makes it easy to create a checklist for a repetitive process. Here’s how:

Create a list to use as a template
Duplicate the list
That’s it. There’s no step three.

Here’s a 30 second video demonstrating how simple it is:

At WorkFlowy, we use this internally all the time. Every time we do a major release, we do a manual run-through of the app, to make sure all the major features are working as expected. We manage this process with a simple, checklist. We have a template, and we create a new copy for every major release. In that copy we record the status and issues particular to that release. Here’s the template we use. All the duplicates are under the list “Testing Notes”.

The Ugly Puppy

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 18:43:00 -0700

Katie, in the picture above, wrote a story, “The Ugly Puppy,” with a little help from her father, Peter. It was inspired by their dog Lottie, also in the picture. They outlined it in WorkFlowy. We thought it was pretty cute. Here it is …

The Ugly Puppy

Characters
- The Ugly Puppy
  - A stray poodle called Kate
  - Looks: Not looked-after, muddy, pink or rainbow
  - Feelings: Sad, glum
  - Behaviour: Kind (even though others are mean to her)
  - Likes: Secret spies, her friends, people that help her
  - Dislikes: When people are mean to her or her friends, The Vulture Gang
- People that steal her - The Vulture Gang (Baddies)
  - Vulture (All his gang call him Leader)
    - When he wants to call his gang, he doesn’t call them by name; he says “Crew. Come.” and they come
  - Rhinoceros
  - Ostrich
  - Tiger (twins with the other tiger)
- People that help her
  - Cats
  - Flamingo
  - Secret spies
  - Tiger (twins with the other tiger)
Storyline
- Based on The Ugly Duckling - a rags to riches tale
- An all-animal story except for the secret spies. The animals can talk.
- In the country of Lakeless
- Beginning
  - Kate wanders around
  - The Vulture gang see her and they think that as nobody plays with her, they can eat her for dinner (but they can’t).
  - They take her a dark cabin into the deepest, darkest place in the woods.
  - They clean her up as soon as they get to the cabin, because they don’t want to eat mud.
- Middle
  - Tiger twins meet up again and again and both decide to help the puppy gang.
- End
  - Kate gets away
  - Last sentence

Improvements for iPhone 5 and iPad apps

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 14:11:10 -0700

If you’re using the iOS app on an iPhone 5 or iPad, you should download the new WorkFlowy update. The improvements: it fills the whole screen of the iPhone 5; it can go into landscape mode on iPad.

WorkFlowy App for iPhone and iPad

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 17:30:00 -0700

You can now download WorkFlowy from the iOS App Store. Yay! Here’s the link.

We’re super happy that we’ve finally gotten something in the app store for you. We’re working on a bunch of improvements like offline support, bringing all the features of desktop to mobile and so on. Please check it out and share the love.

P.S. For all you Android users, we’re super sorry that we aren’t able to release an Android app at the same time as an iPhone app. We haven’t forgotten about you, and we love you very much.

P.P.S The WorkFlowy iOS app uses the same interface as the mobile web version. The benefits of having this in an app are that startup is much faster (after you’ve loaded it once), and it lets us implement useful features you can’t in a web browser. It’s also a necessary precursor to offline, which we’re working on.

Hidden Search Operators

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 18:35:09 -0700

Want to search through your WorkFlowy account like a pirate ninja? There are a number of “secret” search operators that you can use to get a lot more power out of the search feature.

These operators are unofficial features because we plan to add nice interfaces for (most of) them, but for now you power users (you know who you are) will find these useful.

So, without further ado, here they are. Note that we just added a couple of these, so don’t feel too bad if you don’t know about all of them already.

- (NOT)

Add a “-” before a search term if you’d like to exclude items that contain that term.

For example, if you’re using the tags @jesse and #current to assign items to Jesse and mark what he’s currently working on, you can search for “@jesse -#current” to find all the items that Jesse is assigned to that he’s NOT currently working on.

If you search for just negated terms, we’ll filter your current view, removing all items containing those terms. So if you’re looking at a list of tasks that are assigned to @jesse and @mike, you can search for “-@jesse” to show just the ones assigned to @mike.

Add an all-caps “OR” between search terms to search for items that contain either of those terms.

For example, search for “@jesse OR @mike” to show all items assigned to either Jesse or Mike.

“quoted string”

Use double-quotes to find items that contain the exact string between the quotes.

This lets you search for multiple words in sequence (e.g., “”the quick brown fox”“) or search for part of a word or number (e.g., search for “”203”” to find an item containing “123203456”).

is:

We support a GMail-style “is:” operator to search for items that match the category specified. We support three categories right now: “complete”, “shared”, and “embedded”.

For example, you can use the “is:complete” operator to search for completed items. (Note that you’ll need to toggle completed items to be visible to have them show up.) “is:shared” will search for items you’ve shared, and “is:embedded” will search for items you’ve embedded in your account that others have shared.

last-changed:

We remember when each item was last changed. You can see this date by hovering the mouse cursor over an item’s bullet for a second or two.

You can search for items last changed within a time period with the “last-changed:” operator.

For example, search for “last-changed:1d” to search for items changed within the last day. Search for “last-changed:4h” to search for items changed within the last 4 hours. (Days and hours are the time units we support right now.)

One more thing:

You can combine all of these operators in combination with each other. So, for example, you can search for completed items assigned to Jesse that were changed in the last week by searching for “is:complete @jesse last-changed:7d”.

Hope you find these useful.

How Big Can a WorkFlowy Account Get?

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 14:44:00 -0700

We get asked pretty often how big a WorkFlowy account can get before starting to slow down.

The short answer is: really big. I’ll give more detail in a second, but first, a digression…

We’ve insisted on keeping every WorkFlowy account to a single “document” because of the elegance of this approach. When everything’s in the same “document,” you never have to decide when to create a new document or when to merge documents, and there doesn’t need to be a special interface for managing documents (like the document list in Google Docs) or moving items between them. It’s all one simple interface.

When you think about it, though, a WorkFlowy account is actually composed of many documents. Each item is its own document if you click the bullet to zoom in. Because there’s no difference between an item and a document, you never need to wonder about whether something should be “just an item” or a new document unto itself.

Now, back to the original question. Because everything in WorkFlowy is stored on a single virtual page, people often wonder what the limit is on the amount that can be stored on that page.

We’ve done a lot - and continue to do a lot - to keep WorkFlowy fast for large accounts. I’ve been using WorkFlowy for over two years now, and my WorkFlowy account has grown to almost 20,000 items. There is no noticeable slowdown. We have users with account sizes more than double mine, as well. These are large accounts, containing novels’ worth of text.

So the answer is: You are highly unlikely to run into any slowness. There are always bottlenecks, though, and we’re committed to continuing to eliminate these as our users’ accounts continue to grow in size.

How We Use Tags

Wed, 29 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0700

One of the great things about WorkFlowy is that there is no difference between a category, a note, a task, or anything else you create. All of them are just bullet points.

This means it’s easy to turn notes into tasks (by assigning people to them) or add notes under tasks (simply by adding more bullet points under them). It also means you never need to waste time thinking, “Is this a task? Is this a note? Is this a category?” - you just start typing.

Tagging is a powerful feature that lets you add additional layers of organization to the normal WorkFlowy hierarchy. We use them all the time at WorkFlowy HQ.

We recommend using @name tags to assign tasks to people on your team. We add the@mike and @jesse tags to tasks to assign them to ourselves. You can add easily-accessible tags to root level of your list to see all the tasks assigned to a person in one click.

For example:

(We’ll be adding a tag list feature to automate this process in the future.)

We also use #current and #next tags to indicate which tasks we’re working on now and which ones we intend to work on next. That means I can search for “@jesse #current” to see what Jesse is working on right now. The simple combination of @name tags and #current is quite powerful for project management.

Tags are versatile. Another way we use them is for our bug tracker, which is a list of all the bugs we know about but haven’t fixed yet. (Did you think we use one of those slow, bloated dedicated bug trackers? Of course not. :) )

This is a screenshot of the top of our bug tracker:

Our bug tracker is a flat list of bugs that are tagged into platform and categories. Platforms include browsers and mobile OSes (#chrome, #firefox, #ios, etc.) and categories include things like #collaboration, #controls, and so on. We list these tags in the note under the “Bug Tracker” item, which shows up above the list of bugs.

Click on a tag and you see only the bugs relevant to that tag.

We also have a #NEXT-RELEASE tag that we sometimes use to tag bugs that should block our next release.

Whenever we fix a bug, we “complete” it, which hides it from the list. (We generally always hide completed items, which you can do with the control in the top right. We use the “complete” feature both to complete tasks and to archive old stuff that we don’t want to see any more.)

These are just two of our uses of tags. We’ll go into more in the future.

New Pro Feature: Private, Login-based Sharing

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Greetings WorkFlowyans,

We have a special new feature for WorkFlowy Pro users: private, login-based sharing!

We’ve supported sharing via a link for quite a while now. This type of sharing is super fast and easy to use, and it’s great for situations where you’re sharing publicly or with an indeterminate group of people. (Just paste the link into a group email, or Facebook, or whatever, and send it off.)

But link-based sharing isn’t the best approach when you want to share privately with specific people. In this case, you want to grant access to only these people and to know that only they can access the list. You also may want to allow some of those people to edit the list, while allowing others only to view it.

That’s where the new private, login-based sharing feature comes in. This is how you use it.

First, hover over the bullet for the list you want to share and click the “Share” control in the menu that pops up (as normal).

Then click the “Privately to specific email addresses” share option in the dialog that pops up. Enter one or more email addresses in the box that shows up and select whether you’d like to allow them to edit the list or just view it. (You’ll be able to add and remove email addresses later and also change the View/Edit permission for each email.)

Click “Share”, and you’ll be taken to the status dialog, which shows who you’re sharing with and with what type of permission.

It also shows whether each email you’ve shared with is “active” or “inactive.” If an email is active, that means the private sharing invitation has been accepted. (We send a unique invitation link to each email address you share with. This link is only valid for one user.)

That’s all there is to it. You can change the sharing permissions for an email address (or remove it entirely) at any time.

Also remember that your collaborators can add your list to their own account, which means they’ll see it every time they log in and (if they want) receive email updates when it changes. You can read more about this here.

(As an aside, if you’re interested in upgrading to WorkFlowy Pro, take a look at the Settings dialog in WorkFlowy. You get there by clicking on the down arrow in the top right and then on “Settings”.)