Using the smartphone can be disastrous for your productivity. But with all the tools it offers, the device can also significantly improve your productivity, for example by making (to-do) lists. WorkFlowy actually offers everything that is needed for this. Without unnecessary frills and with accessible controls.
It is best to write down brilliant ideas as soon as possible. Not only because otherwise you might forget them, also because all those thoughts cause unrest. By writing down tasks, chores or thoughts, you keep your mind empty. You already have the device for it in your pocket: the smartphone.
But which app is best to use? For to-do lists, there are plenty of options, such as Todoist, To Do, and TickTick. For notes, we have Evernote and OneNote. Many productivity tools are unfortunately unnecessarily cumbersome in practice. WorkFlowy tries to avoid this by using text as the basis. It seems like a bull’s eye. Many tech industry giants use it to improve productivity or brainstorm new ideas. We show you what you can do with it!
1 Installation
WorkFlowy is widely available. Except for Android, the app is available for iPhone and iPad and for the desktop (Windows, macOS and Linux). And then you can also simply use WorkFlowy via a browser. If you use the same account everywhere, data is automatically synchronized. In practice, this happens seamlessly after every change. You can therefore be sure that you have the latest notes everywhere. In this workshop we take the Android app as a starting point. The first step after installing this app is to create an account. This goes relatively quickly: after entering your e-mail address you will receive a verification code by e-mail. If you enter that code in the app, you are immediately logged in. If you use WorkFlowy in, for example, a browser, it works the same way.
2 Make lists!
When you start WorkFlowy for the first time, a virtually blank screen opens with only a handful of icons. You can immediately start adding items. The free version has a limit of 250 items per month. All entered items are listed one below the other with the known bullets. By tapping on such a bullet, you can make a list under it again. The bullets also work as a navigation: if you click on a bullet, you will see the lists at that level, with a kind of breadcrumb trail at the top showing the path via which you got there. There are of course more apps with which you can create extremely long lists, but they are rarely as clear as with WorkFlowy, even if you ‘nest’ very deeply. And that is possible up to a maximum of 1,000 layers! Now that may be going too far, but a few levels deep already help enormously to divide a project into clearer pieces, for example. You can always expand or collapse the deeper levels with the arrow on the right.
3 Input options
Making lists at different levels is very practical, as is the possibility to navigate through them via the bullets to ‘zoom in’ on what is important at that moment. But there are more tools you can use to find items. The additional input options help with this. You see the icons for this when entering items in a bar at the bottom. You can add notes to items, but you can also group items with an at sign. This is especially useful for assigning certain tasks to a person. For example, you add @name. You can also organize items based on hashtags, for example by adding #work, #prive or #important to an item. There is also an option to move an item down or up. Handy for small projects that are in danger of getting out of hand and deserve more attention. You can also check off items when you have completed them. And with the icon at the top right (star) you can mark a level as a favorite. The next question is, of course: how can you search items or navigate to at signs, hashtags and favorites?
4 Navigation
At the very bottom of the app there is a prominent bar with extra icons that help with navigation. This way you can search through all items via the search icon by text. The icon on the left (three bars) brings up a sidebar with all levels for lists. In this sidebar you will see your favorite levels at the top. If you click on an at sign or hashtag in the work window, for example, you will immediately see all the items that belong to it. You can mark this action as a favorite via the search bar at the top. After this, this action will automatically appear in the sidebar. You can do the same for ‘normal’ searches. This way you can easily create personal searches that are always clickable via the sidebar. The right-most icon (three dots) shows an additional settings menu for the app and an option to hide items you’ve completed. You can also change the text size or undo or repeat certain actions via this menu.
5 Settings and extras
WorkFlowy is not always the best option. For example, if you like to work with hard deadlines, you will miss the option to assign an expiration date to items. One way to work around that is to add a date hashtag. For about a year now there has been an experimental option for adding dates and searching by date. You can turn this on via the settings. But it is not yet complete and, for example, the option to set a reminder is missing. So with the free version you can add up to 250 items to your lists per month. The Pro version ($ 4.99 per month or $ 49 per year) does not have this limitation and also offers some extras, such as the ability to back up all content to Dropbox.
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