For the past couple weeks, I’ve been playing around with online outliner WorkFlowy.Com and it has gradually become a tool I’m finding indispensable.
On the one hand, WorkFlowy is ridiculously simple. Set up an account, login, and you have an empty screen to start entering parent and child nodes like pretty much every other outlining tool in the world.
On the other hand, WorkFlowy adds a couple of powerful twists. The first is the ability to take any child node and focus in just on that. So while I’m writing this post in WorkFlowy, I see a blank page with just the title of this particular child node at the top, so I can focus just on writing down my thoughts about WorkFlowy.
WorkFlowy also features both # and @ tagging systems. For example, as I am outlining the various steps on a project I am outlining, I can tag any of the action items as #todo and then easily view all of my todo items throughout my huge spreadsheet. Similarly if I had a todo that I needed to assign to someone else, I could add a @name tag. Some people are using WorkFlowy as a full-fledged task manager, but I just want to keep track of tasks to transfer them to Toodledo, which I prefer to use for task management.
Finally, WorkFlowy works very well in Android and iOS browsers. I was on a long trip and spent a couple hours adding and reorganizing items in WorkFlowy on my Android phone. It worked like a charm. This would be awesome on a tablet.
As for the downsides? At the moment WorkFlowy is entirely browser-based. The developer is apparently working on mobile apps for the iOS and Android platforms, but at the moment there is no app version and hence no offline option either.
The export options are also fairly weak. In a popup menu associated with in each node and at the bottom of each page on WorkFlowy is an export option. Selecting the export option will pop up a new windows with the text of either the entire outline or a particular subset of it pre-selected which you can then copy and paste into another application. At the moment, that’s pretty much the extent of WorkFlowy’s export options. Obviously, an export as CSV/email to Gmail/copy to Google Docs, etc. would be extremely useful to have.
That said, WorkFlowy is one of the more useful tools that I’ve run across in a long time — I’ve pretty much started using it for every text-based thing I do, from tracking tasks to writing blog posts like this.