We made this change to protect users who do not use secure passwords from a common attack called credential stuffing, which was recently attempted against Workflowy. If you use a password manager and prefer passwords, you can easily switch back to a password here.

Also, some logged in users are reporting trouble logging in after this change, but it seems to be resolving itself after reloading.

If you have any problems not addressed above, please email help@workflowy.com and we will address your problems ASAP.

Most people find or develop one system and stick with it for long stretches of time – ‘it’s not perfect but it’s good enough for me’ they might think.

Others however seem to have a natural inclination to constantly explore and sample from this vast world. Trying out all the systems and techniques, and incorporating bits and pieces into an ever-changing ultimate system. A splash of pomodoro technique, a dash of time blocking, and a side of GTD for good measure. These folks are never content with ‘good enough’ and are constantly on the hunt for perfection. When you ask them what they’ve tried – they can confidently rattle off a handful of the things they’ve experimented with and probably incorporated some aspects of into their daily lives.

These folks are productivity enthusiasts, brainstorm technique gurus, and metacognition explorers. They’re interested in how processes and frameworks can help individuals achieve their highest goals and reflect on their deepest thoughts.

If this sounds familiar and you’re interested in writing for the Workflowy blog then check out the freelance writer position below and get in touch with us via the google form link at the bottom .

General

We are looking for a freelance writer to regularly contribute content to the Workflowy blog and for guest posts around the topics of productivity, time management, problem solving, and general organization.

About the position

• This is a long-term freelance gig
• You’ll be required to contribute at least 1 high quality post a week to the blog.
• You’ll collaborate with our marketing team to create compelling, easy to understand articles around the productivity, time management, and self-organization spaces.
• Topics could be pitched or assigned and the marketing team will assist in editing and optimizing content for SEO purposes.

About you

You love to write and are deeply involved or interested in the productivity, focus, brainstorming, and general organization spaces. You love trying out tools and methods to help you be more productive and stay on top of everything. You’re interested in researching how different industries and types of people take these tools and use them in their own day-to-day – and then explaining your findings to a broader audience.

Functions

• Independently research topics relevant for our audience
• Pitch ideas for new articles on main and adjacent topics
• Summarize and develop interesting findings into articles
• Write original articles for the Workflowy blog
• Write occasional articles for guest posts
• Collaborate with marketing team on optimizing content for SEO
• Develop an understanding of the audience – what topics work, which don’t

Bonus points

• You’re already using Workflowy to stay organized in your personal / professional life
• You already write, podcast, make videos or create any type of content related to our key topics
• Proficient in SEO keyword research and article optimization

Some buzzwords 

If you practice, have tried or are familiar with most of the items on this list and are interested in researching and writing about them and adjacent topics, then you’re very likely someone who will enjoy the position.

• Personal productivity method
• Bullet journal
• Pomodoro method
• Eisenhower matrix
• Remote work
• Context switching
• Prioritization
• Time blocking
• Brainstorming techniques
• Journaling
• GTD

We’d love to see

• 2 – 3 example of things you’ve written in the past
• Bonus points if they’re related to our main topics but it’s totally fine if they’re not
• Could be published or unpublished

If this sounds like you the we’d love to get in touch!

Please click the button below to view the google form and apply.

Important: Most people who received an email from us did not have their accounts compromised! We emailed every single user who logged in during the period of the attack and told them as much.

The only way your account was compromised was if your Workflowy password is re-used on other sites. If you use a strong password and don’t re-use it, your account 100% has not been compromised. For people who re-use passwords, we simply do not know exactly which accounts were compromised.

What happened?

As we posted about on our Twitter account, individual Workflowy accounts were recently targeted by an unknown attacker.  This malicious activity initially appeared to be the work of a spammer, but upon further investigation we identified that the real target was gaining access to individual accounts.  Workflowy’s back-end systems and infrastructure were not compromised in this attack.

While we do not have visibility to the specific tools used by the attacker, evidence from the attack appears consistent with “credential stuffing,” which is the automated use of collected usernames and passwords to gain fraudulent access to user accounts.  You can read more about credential stuffing here.  We have no way of knowing where the attacker got the credential information used in this attack, but we have identified no evidence that it originated with Workflowy.

We also believe that our actions mitigated and ultimately stopped this attack, as further discussed below.  Based on our investigation, the attacker targeted a limited number of Workflowy accounts during the attack, and the vast majority of Workflowy users were not impacted.  Additionally, because of the nature of the attack, the only accounts impacted are those that a) use passwords for login, and b) use the same password for Workflowy as for other services.

How did we respond?

On March 12, we received a flurry of user reports of receiving multiple automated e-mail messages from us regarding their accounts.  After an initial investigation, we determined that the activity began on March 10 and appeared to be the work of a spammer.  We posted to Twitter to alert users about this.

We take our relationship with our users seriously, so we acted promptly based on what was known at the time and communicated what we believed was occurring.  We were not initially aware that any user accounts were at risk of compromise.

In the following days, we observed user login activity similar to what triggered the flurry of e-mails reported to us on March 12.  Because of that previous activity, we were able to quickly identify and act on this attack.  We also determined that the attacker was attempting to compromise user accounts through credential stuffing.

During the attack, we implemented a number of different measures to stop the attacker.  We will not publicly detail the steps taken because we do not want future attackers to have that information, but some like our implementation of reCAPTCHA were visible to users.  We saw initial successes with these actions, followed by the attacker making changes and resuming the attack.  When other measures did not work, we temporarily blocked all users from logging in to completely halt the attack.  During our response, we were able to block the attack for most of the time that it lasted.  We also posted to Twitter to alert our users and continued to post updates.  On March 19, we were able to stop the attack completely. 

We are currently continuing to require reCAPTCHA authentication for all logins to prevent this type of attack from happening again.  Out of an abundance of caution, we have transitioned all user accounts who logged in during the period of the attack to email based login codes. If you are one such user and prefer a password, you can reset your password here. We apologize for any inconvenience caused by these temporary changes.

Workflowy is otherwise back to full functionality for our users.

We are also in the process of adding additional levels of protection and further hardening our systems.  These actions include:

1. Implementing two factor authentication, which confirms user’s identities using their phone numbers.  We will encourage all users to enable this functionality when available.

2. Integrating with Castle.io, a well-respected solution for fraud prevention and account security that will help us prevent attacks and alert users of suspicious activity.

3. Hiring a reputable third-party firm to conduct security testing on our systems. 

4. We are considering migrating all users to email based logins, with an option to easily convert back to password-based logins if they so choose. Our goal is to create a safer default for non-technical people who do not use password managers, while minimizing disruption for people who  do use password managers.

5. Adding additional capabilities and/or processes to our team going forward.

Was my account compromised?

As described above, our investigation indicated that this attack occurred during a specific period of time.  We have identified user accounts that were logged into during that timeframe and therefore potentially at risk.  We have reached out to those users who may have been impacted.  

Please note that some users may have received a flurry of account-related emails during these dates, but that does not necessarily mean their accounts were compromised.  Similarly, a reset password does not necessarily indicate that an account was compromised—we reset passwords for all user accounts with any login during the period.  

If you did not receive a message from us about this, we have no evidence that your account was at risk.

Do I need to do anything?

Out of an abundance of caution, we suggest that all users who convert back to password-based logins consider changing their passwords and avoid re-using passwords that are used elsewhere.  We also encourage users to take advantage of the additional security features that we will be adding to Workflowy.

We know that our users utilize Workflowy for many purposes and projects, but because we cannot see what information is in individual users’ accounts, we cannot advise on what might be in your account.

We are committed to continue working to improve and further secure Workflowy.  We do not take for granted that you chose us, and we are excited to find new ways for Workflowy to work for you. 

Thank you for using Workflowy.  We are proud to be the sidekick you trust for your notes, thoughts, and whatever else you put in Workflowy.

The situation

For the past week, someone has been executing a credential stuffing attack against the Workflowy servers. This means that they got a huge list of emails and passwords from somewhere (hacks of other sites), and they’re checking whether those same email/password combos will give them access to any Workflowy accounts.

We’ve been working to address the issue, but yesterday they escalated the attack and we had to turn off login from our mobile and desktop apps in order to prevent people getting spammed further and the attacker having the opportunity to log in.

What we are doing

We are currently implementing the protections needed to re-enable signup/login from our desktop and mobile applications, and stop the login spam.

We will keep you updated. We will post updates here, on twitter, and on our status page.

What you should do

1. If you use a password to log into Workflowy, and you use that same password on other sites, you should change it here.
2. If the email account you use for Workflowy has a password that you use with other sites, you should change your email password as well.

Thank you for your patience and our apologies for the inconvenience.

Just drag and drop the file where you want it to show up in your Workflowy document or left swipe on a bullet on your mobile device to bring up the bullet menu and add your files. Be sure to update your mobile and desktop apps to the latest version for the best experience!

Why is this awesome?

With the addition of files and images to Workflowy, a new world of possibilities is available. The same ease of use and flexibility you already know and enjoy in Workflowy is also a part of the files and images upgrade.

You can manipulate images and files with the same keyboard shortcuts you already use for bullets. In addition, all the other features like infinite nesting, mirrors, internal links, sharing, fractal boards and so on work with files and images as you expect. This means that it’s ridiculously easy to get started adding files to your documents.

What sort of things can I do with it?

While the possibilities are only limited by your creativity and needs, we’ve come up with a couple of ideas to get you thinking about adding files and images to your Workflowy today.

1. Enrich the documents you already create

Everything from work proposals, post outlines, class notes and so on can become much more valuable now that you can also easily add images to give the surrounding text context. This is arguably better than using a traditional document creation app since you also have at your disposal the ability to infinitely nest items. Instead of creating one very long document in something like google docs, you would instead nest the different sections into relevant bullets. This makes it much easier to keep related information visually close to each other, so you don’t have to scroll back and forth.

The ability to easily add relevant files inline saves you the trouble of having to first upload the files to a third party service like dropbox or google drive, create links, edit permissions and finally add those links. With Workflowy you simply drag and drop the files where you want them to show up.

Ideas to get you started

• Quickly outlining blog posts and reports
• Taking photos for a job proposal and then adding the notes below each image
• Adding screenshots of papers and the original pdf to research outlines
• Adding lecture slides to class notes
• Take photos of whiteboards and documents then incorporate them into your processes
• Including images of the steps in a recipe

2. Store and share important assets

Collaborating with a team just got an upgrade. Now it’s easier than ever to share templates, assets, screenshots, references and important files all from your shared Workflowy document. You don’t have to mess with third party apps or worry about sharing outdated links or incorrect permissions – if your team members have access to the shared space, they have access to the files, it couldn’t be easier.

Ideas to get you started

• Keeping a repository of commonly used templates
• Creating and sharing how-to guides with photos and screenshots
• Creating documentation with images and gifs for internal or external use
• Centralizing assets that are created by one team and used by another

3. Document and track file changes

Use Workflowy’s infinitely nesting bullets to easily track changes and modifications to files. This makes it easy document changes to images and any other type of file. Forget about using confusing file-name schemes to keep track of which version is the latest version – simply nest the newest version and done. This is especially useful if you’re working with a team, everyone can easily see which version is the latest and also have access to any previous version if they need to.

Ideas to get you started

• Sharing drafts of files with clients
• Keeping everyone on a team up to date with the latest version of a file
• Simplify review and editing flows, no more misplaced versions

How to upload files

There are several ways to upload a file.

1. The Bullet Menu ⋯

Create a new blank bullet, then from the bullet menu choose ‘Upload file’. This will bring up your operating system’s file browser where you can choose a single file or multiple files then upload them. If you do this on a bullet that already has content – then the file or image you upload will be nested under that bullet.

2. Dragging and dropping

On the web and desktop version of Workflowy you can simply drag and drop files and images directly into Workflowy. Once you release them, they’ll start to upload.

3. Pasting a screenshot

Take a screenshot with the keyboard shortcut for your operating system. On Windows, that’s – Windows key + PrtScn. On Mac, that’s – CMD + Shift + Control + 4. Then paste directly into Workflowy.

Image actions

Image files have 5 different actions you can perform on them.

1. Resize

On the web and desktop versions of Workflowy, if you place your cursor over an image, you’ll see a vertical bar on the right side of the image that you can drag left or right to resize the image.

2. View full screen

If you hover on an image, then click or tap on the options icon (three vertical dots) then select ‘Show full screen’, the image will display in full screen mode. This mode focuses on the image and gives the image a solid background. To exit full screen mode, simply click or tap on the ‘x’ icon in the top right corner. You can also double click on an image to enter full screen mode.

3. View original image

If you hover on an image, then click or tap on the icon with the square and the arrow coming out of it, the image will open a new browser window (in the desktop version as well) with the image in its full resolution.

4. Download

On the web and desktop versions of Workflowy, if you click or tap on the icon with the arrow pointing down to the drive you’ll download the image to your device.

5. Delete them

On the web and desktop versions of Workflowy, if you click or tap on the icon with the trash can you’ll see a modal that checks to make sure you really want to delete that image.

Image options

You can change the default image thumbnail size from the settings menu – clicking on the three vertical dots in the right-hand side of the menu bar or by hovering over an image then clicking the three vertical dots icon on that image and selecting ‘Settings’. From either of these two places you can choose to show the thumbnails in a large or small size.

Mobile support

Files and images are fully supported on your preferred mobile platform. On mobile devices, to add files or images, you simply:

1. Create a new bullet
2. Left-swipe on that bullet to open the bullet menu
3. Tap on ‘Upload file’ and choose your file

File size limits

Pro subscribers enjoy unlimited uploads with a 5gb individual file size limit.

Free users have a 100MB global cap.

Back to you

We hope you enjoy the feature and be sure to share what you’re using it for on social media, we love seeing users do interesting and creative things with Workflowy.

Life can get pretty chaotic: whether it’s the three new projects your boss just assigned you or the never-ending privilege of being a parent, all these responsibilities add up – and if you don’t have a system in place to deal with everything, you’re probably going to try and brute-force your way through them.

By taking just a couple of minutes each day to plan out your activities, you’ll get to destress and squash those niggling thoughts that lead to stress and anxiety: “Is there enough in my bank account to cover everything?”, “I feel like I’m forgetting something important”, “Should I do this before or after lunch?”. Getting into the habit of daily planning is the cornerstone of how to handle stress.

I’ve got a simple system that I swear by. A daily planner in WorkFlowy. I’m going to quickly outline how my system works and how it ties in with my monthly calendar and projects. Do this and watch your stress evaporate:

All of my daily tasks start off in my WorkFlowy calendar. Although whittled down, here’s a sample of my actual tasks. The struggle is real:

My calendar only ever contains 2 months. I treat it as a “tickler file” of sorts… where I pull tasks from and push recurring items back to.

1. Recurring daily, weekly and monthly routines, meetings, bills, etc.
2. Scheduled events, birthdays, reminders…
3. I also have projects within my calendar. Why not??

At the end of each day, I pull all items from the next day in my Calendar into my daily planner. But before that, I push anything that I’ve actively decided to not do tomorrow to a suitable future date. The beach can wait – because my schedule tomorrow will probably not allow for it. I’m feeling so in control right now:

So here’s what my daily planner looks like:

I know. Many are thinking the same think thing I once thought: “Why didn’t I think of this sooner?” So simple. So effective. So thoughtful.

Now… how to easily move items from my calendar into my daily planner?

In the above image, you’ll see that I’ve starred my CALENDAR as well as my daily planner (TODAY), so that they appear in the Starred Pages section of my left bar. I’m going to go ahead and start transferring items from my main document into time blocks in the left bar:

And here is my updated daily planner:

Notice in the image above at 7AM I’ve scheduled a project: Dog training. I’ve also included the next action after the title, which is to play a recording of our doorbell while our dogs are feeding. This is so that they won’t bark whenever they hear the doorbell because they’ll associate the doorbell with food. In the image below, you’ll see I’ve created a board out of my “Dog training” project. I have the current areas of focus in the “DOING” column, one of which I’ve included in the project’s title.

Exactly the same with my “Garden torches” project. My next action up is to split bamboo with a machete…

However… I’ve decided that my schedule is a little too full today to split bamboo with a machete… and so I’m going to push this project to tomorrow’s date in my calendar:

This is the beauty of the classic Kanban “pushing and pulling” dynamic. If you’ve got too much on your plate today, you can push certain projects or tasks into the future. You won’t miss them in your calendar. You can also do the same within your WorkFlowy daily planner.

Most of the items I’ve got scheduled are recurring tasks and events. And so once I’m done with my tasks, I’ll push them back into the calendar to the next day of the week/ date up:

And so we’re back to where we started. Tomorrow’s another day.

Noteworthy tips:

1. You can also use mirrors to bring individual project tasks into your daily planner and/ or your calendar, so that you can keep those project tasks within their project outlines and not dissociate them. Just Shift+Drag any task into the place you want in your left bar:

… and once you’re done with that task you can delete it. The original task will remain in its project.

2. If you’re interested in having a calendar in WorkFlowy, here’s a post called “The Genius Forever Calendar Template”. It will take the work out of manually creating monthly lists.
3. You can create a template outline for your daily planner time blocks, which you can then duplicate daily – or just copy the time blocks you need.

And that’s a wrap! With just a tad bit of daily planning, you can significantly manage stress and anxiety in your professional and personal life.

Please do share how you plan your day and manage your tasks in WorkFlowy in the comment section below. And if you have any sanity-saving tips on how to reduce stress via planning, please share those as well!

The more complex something appears to be, the greater the chance we’re going to endlessly procrastinate. Here follows how WorkFlowy helped me to stop procrastinating about a complexity that was mostly just in my mind…

A short 2 days ago I went on a hiking trail with Emma, my 12-year old daughter. The first in over a decade for me – and the first-ever for Emma. That’s a lot of procrastinating. And this was my embarrassingly simple process in WorkFlowy:

What are the bare essentials when it comes to breaking ground… to putting one foot in front of the other and making a start? Some people just need a spade. All I need is a WorkFlowy bullet. That’s an unstoppable start.

It all started a little over 10 months ago. The desire to be in wide open spaces and breathe fresh, clean air on forest trails lead me to simply type out:

I then zoomed in… and in an instant I had:

An idea takes on living color when you jot it down. The idea becomes an intrigue as you start digging deeper and carving out its shape and feel. Soon you have the beginnings of a project that takes on character and increasing depth each time you hit Tab – and expansiveness with each Enter stroke.

My Hiking outline grew to contain a simple list of gear to start off on day trips to parks, mountains and rivers outside of the city… including dates and details of upcoming trips, links to various social media profiles of hiking clubs and other basics:

Next up, I booked a day trip with a reputable hiking club.

And then life threw a Covid-19 curveball at me. At us all.

Fast forward 10 months.

Here’s the thing, though: The groundwork was all done and even though I had to shelve my plans for almost a year, it was as simple as picking up right where I left off – once Covid restrictions were lifted. My WorkFlowy list was still there. The mountains, rivers and waterfalls were still there. Our backpacks that’d arrived in the mail were still there. All that remained to do was to reserve our spots on the very next trip.

Here’s what you’ll need to do to go on a trail, clean up a paper trail or blaze your own trail and beat procrastination:

1. Write down your goal/ project in WorkFlowy and zoom in (Alt+Right). Here begins your project: You’re really doing this! Believe it or not, you’ve already overcome a great deal of inertia to get to this point. The zooming in part means that now you’ve got your thinking cap on.
2. Get everything out of your head. Whatever comes to mind. Don’t get caught up in thinking about how long it’s going to take to achieve or all the steps you need to do. Just get it down, one step at a time. Over-analyzing at this stage will likely lead to paralysis like I experienced – and keep you from even getting started.
3. Single out a “next action”… a next concrete step: Get as specific and fine-grained as possible. Instead of “Find a hiking club”, break it down further: “Google ‘hiking clubs in the area'”. The more specific a directive is, the less chance you have of sidestepping it. This gets to the very heart of how to stop putting things off and start getting things done.
4. Do that next action. Now you’ve got momentum! Suddenly you’ll find that you’re in the middle of a project and you’re picking up steam. You’ll be wondering what that hot, foggy vapor is all around you. It’s your steam!

WorkFlowy helps to intuitively craft an idea that will in due course come to fruition. The first bullet is the first step in your journey of a thousand miles – a project that will bravely take on a life of its own.

A bullet gets you started. A bullet gets you thinking. A bullet helps you overcome procrastination.

How far and wide you go – it’s entirely up to you. I hiked 12 kilometers up and down a mountain with a loved one. And the next trail is not too far from now…

What are mirrors useful for?

There are many use cases where we think mirrors could be really useful, but some basic examples are:

1. Pulling items from a meeting bullet into a project bullet. This is better than copying and pasting because you also get the entire context of that meeting for free.

2. Taking smaller chunks of work from a project into a today or to-do list. This way you keep the structure of your project intact without having to copy and paste back and forth when you want to add details, mark something as complete or assign it to someone. 

3. Creating different views for different purposes. You can mirror related items into separate collections or views. Say you’re outlining a novel and want to keep everything in order but also make a list of all the chapters where a specific character appears. You can just mirror those chapters into a new bullet for that character and see if their development makes sense throughout the story, and if it doesn’t make changes directly from the mirrors without having to open up each chapter.

4. Turning journal notes into a source of inspiration. Mirrors let you take journal or diary entries and mirror important items into places where they’ll be more useful. Say you get a great idea and want to remember it for later, you can mirror it into an ideas bullet. Or say you have a profound realization and want to remember that for later, just mirror it into a musings bullet. This way you don’t have to choose a single place to keep things if it makes sense for them to exist in multiple places.

5. Mirroring an entire project into a today bullet. Since you can mirror bullets of any size, why not just mirror an entire project somewhere you check everyday. This way you can open up the entire project at any time from where it’s most comfortable for you without having to move back and forth within your WorkFlowy to work on it or check the progress of something. Super convenient.

It’s worth noting that you can make multiple mirrors from a single bullet – and any change made from any of them will be made to the other ones. You can also make multiple mirrors of different bullets at the same time – for example if you wanted to mirror a couple of items from a project into a to-do list. Additionally, you can check where all the mirrors are for any given bullet from the item menu, so don’t worry about losing track of them.

How to make a mirror

There are four, count them, four different ways to make mirrors. 

1. From the item menu – Click on the item menu for the bullet you want to mirror and choose ‘Mirror’, then just paste the mirror anywhere you want.

2. With a keyboard shortcut – Place your cursor anywhere on the bullet you want to mirror and press CMD+Shift+M on Mac or Alt+Shift+M on Windows, then just paste the mirror where you want it to go.

3. Inline – Wherever you want to place a mirror, just start typing double parenthesis ‘((’ and you’ll get a prompt yo type in the name of the bullet you want to mirror. You can use the arrow keys to highlight the right bullet and then press enter to select it.

4. Shift+dragging – Select the bullet or bullets you want to mirror and then hold the shift key while you click and drag the bullets where you want them to go. Protip: This method works great with the sidebar when you want to mirror things somewhere deep in your WorkFlowy.

Deleting mirrors

You might be wondering what happens when you delete mirrors. If you have more than two mirrors, you can delete them and the remaining mirrors will continue to live their happy mirror lives unperturbed. If you have only two mirrors and you delete one, the remaining mirror will go back to being a regular bullet.

Mobile support

On mobile devices, you can create mirrors by swiping left on the bullet you want to mirror and tapping ‘mirror’ from the item menu. Then just paste the mirror where you want it to go.

Now, check out some real examples

To get you started thinking about how you might incorporate mirrors into your WorkFlowy, we put together a page with videos and templates so you can try them out for yourself!

We’ve released a unique web clipper with the full power of our fractal notes right inside of it. It lets you take notes on the link you’re clipping at the moment you’re gathering the information, without having to switch context. You can capture your thoughts, re-organize and share at the moment the content is freshest in your mind.

Click here to Install for Google Chrome. Other browsers are coming soon.

Please try it out and let us know what you think.

Note: Our official announcement of this happened on twitter, so that’s where most of the action is if you want to see people’s comments.

Fractal boards offer a new way to organize information, building upon the concept of boards popularized by Trello. It’s a different and powerful take on this familiar concept, and it’s already changing the way Workflowy users organize their brains.

You can play with a demo on this page: https://workflowy.com/post/fractal-boards/