Workflowy is part of a small class of programs called infinite outliners. This is to say you manage your information in outline format with any number of levels that you need. Any item or section of your data can be zoomed into. Once an item becomes the focus, all editing and searching is confined within it and any subitems. This gives the functional equivalence of folders (main items) and files (sub items).
Once you sign in with a free account, you are presented with a blank page. You can organize your information with indented bullets and also hash tags in your text. Each bullet can have a note associated with it. Just press / then type add note or press Shift-Enter on any bullet to enter/update its note.
All the basic Markdown formatting is available. Text can be formatted with bold, underline, italic and foreground / background colors. Bullets can be changed to Paragraphs or Level 1 or 2 Headings for bigger text.
An example of an outline is below.
Here we see many bullets organized with indent levels and some bold text formatting.
Clicking on the bullet symbol with zoom into that text and display breadcrumbs along the top.
Every bullet item can be considered a task. Pressing Control-Enter will complete an item and strikethrough it. If you prefer, you can add a checkbox to any item by typing a slash / then choosing To-Do or click the three dots … and choose Turn Into then pick To-Do.
The three strengths of Workflowy IMHO are: 1) easy to enter information, 2) easy to categorize items and 3) easy to search on items. The search mechanism does take some time to learn if you are using tags and dates find specific items. Below are the main categories I use each day.
Under the Getting Things Done section, I have:
Clicking on the bullet next to Daily Tasks shows us:
As you can see, each of these items has a date. These are used with saved searches that show me tasks due Today or Tomorrow. If I click in the search box and type today I will see just those items for today.
Clicking on a date shows a popup calendar which makes it easy to set dates. For my daily tasks, I simply choose Tomorrow to mark them done for today.
I also have sections for Next and Scheduled Tasks. You can read up on various ways to do GTD here.
I use Scheduled Tasks for tracking when bills are due. Next tasks are tasks that are not repeated like Daily Tasks.
Another list I use is for Grocery shopping. I simply uncheck items I need then at the store I recheck them as they are picked up.
A unique feature of Workflowy is you can Share any of your lists and allow anyone to view and/or edit the lists. This Grocery list is shared with my children so they can add items to it at any time. To share, just click on the main item bullet to display it then click on the 3 dots at the upper right to display the menu. From the menu, choose Share to see this:
I can either send an email to others who have Workflowy accounts OR use the Invite by secret link to send a special link to anyone. I have not found any other program that allows this, even without paying for a Pro account.
Another big section that I use is for both daily journal entries and daily habit tracking.
The Journal entries have numerous tags for things like Weight, Steps (walking), Breakfast, Lunch, Supper, etc. Today’s entry looks like this:
By using tags one is able to search on particular items. Let’s say I wanted to see Lunches this month. I would click on the April bullet then enter the search text #lunch
Under the Habit Tracking section are short todo lists for each day. I simply check off the ones I have done. I can go back later and search on something like lastmonth > -is:complete to see which items I did not complete. The Habits for today look like this. I have already checked off the Morning Walk so it is greyed out.
Once you figure out what you want to track in Workflowy you can add hashtags like #exercise or @home and judiciously use dates in order to pull up the information in many different ways. The program allows any search to be saved into a sidebar list and each of those searches can be named. For example, I have these searches saved. For searches that are limited to a particular sub section, those show in List at the end.
So, ALL Today searches everything under the Home item. But, Today’s Journal only searches under Daily Journal. It does take a while to figure out what is best for your needs. Once you have a number of saved searches, the program becomes VERY easy to use.
Since the program searches everything within 2 seconds, I decided to add the New Testament Bible into my information.
The sky is the limit for what you can manage with Workflowy. The free version allows around 250 new bullets a month while the $8.99/month Pro account is unlimited. You can also insert links to other web pages, display live links to YouTube videos (playable in the program) and do various forms of text formatting. Standard headings, bold, italic, underline along with foreground and background colors are available. As you can see, tags themselves can be colored.
For more information on Workflowy, please visit here.