Workflowy is to TODO as git is to svn | Hacker News Reader

Workflowy is to TODO as git is to svn

swizec.com

86 pointsSwizec76 comments

I was in the same boat with regards to TODOs, and I asked myself, given how well steeped we are in technology nowadays - surely this is a solved problem?

Turns out, it is. emacs' org-mode does pretty much the exact same thing WorkFlowy does, only it's tied into all the other niceties of emacs (and to admit that is saying something, I was a vim user). Plus, thanks to Dropbox, and MobileOrg for iPhones and Android, you can sync it to your mobile device quickly and easily.

Each to their own and all that, but I really, really like org-mode. The only reason I've slowed down on it a bit currently (using Astrid atm) is because the Android client is still relatively weak; as soon as that picks up a bit I'll be back on it full-time.

I like the idea of this, but there's not an Android version of MobileOrg at the moment - so I'll hold off trying it for a while.

There's https://github.com/matburt/mobileorg-android/wiki/, which is fairly decent. It's still very rough around the edges, and nowhere near the quality of the iPhone MobileOrg, but it's a decent enough start - sticking the orgs in Dropbox keeps everything in sync :).

But yeah, I basically came to the same conclusion (there wasn't a usable solution), and switched to Astrid on the Android tied to Producteev (as it had a plugin for that off the bat) - I put immediate things to remember into there, and most of my notes and other organisational stuff stays in org-mode. When the Android MobileOrg improves, I'll probably use that full time.

There is, but I don't know how to use it. http://www.appbrain.com/app/mobileorg/com.matburt.mobileorg

Coupled with vim or emacs, the iPhone, PlainText.app is nice, simple way to read and edit files on the go.

I keep trying new tools when they come out, but find myself always snapping back to Notational Velocity.

Workflowy reminds me of OmniOutliner, they share a very similar, hierarchical approach. Sadly they also share similar problems; a GUI that's too slow for my fingers and too complex for my little brain.

The GUI-complexity stems from the enforced hierarchy. Indenting stuff seems nice at first, and makes it look tidy. But after a while I'd find myself constantly futzing with the indentation in the futile attempt to structure what doesn't want to be structured.

And finally workflowy has the added drawback of living inside the browser - which is not nearly as close to my fingertips as a native app.

For me NV is ultimately the better approach. I can not praise it highly enough. Think: "full-text search for your brain". Try it out if you haven't yet.

I have used Notational Velocity, I like it, but I absolutely love Taskpaper. I have used almost every single task-manager you could possible think of, but taskpaper for mac is the only one I found to be no-nonsense and intuitive.

Mac only. if you haven't tried it yet, you should try it. You will love it. http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/taskpaper

TodoPaper is the Windows equivalent: http://widefido.com/products/todopaper/

When I switched to Linux, I found that Zim

http://zim-wiki.org/

came close enough to Notational Velocity for my purposes. The key feature both share is giving me the ability to very quickly jump to a note by typing its name in. (With Zim you do this by typing cntrl-j.) I'm reluctant to try any note manager that doesn't have that feature.

Does it allow for easy syncing between multiple machines?

It works on formatted text files. So you could use Dropbox, version control, rsync, etc.

Sweet!

Project Hedgehog (http://projecthedgehog.com) was designed to address many of these complaints. The UI is almost completely keyboard-driven and fast, and stripped down to bare bones. It's a desktop app that runs on OS X and Windows. It has fast search dialog accessible with one keystroke.

Like OmniOutliner/Workflowy, though, it also is hierarchy-oriented, which I think is most natural for ordered tasks. It has a slight learning curve and the UI is very utilitarian, but it has drastically reduced the amount of stuff I have to keep in my head as I'm working.

Wow NV is exactly what I was planning to build as a webapp to scratch my itch. Single text box for both search-as-you-type and for creating a new note. Registered boxuno.com for it.

But I never expected to be able to monetize it; it'd always be a little side project. Such apps are a dime a dozen. The problem with these apps is that simpler is better, but it's hard to differentiate your app from others (or even differentiate between free and premium versions) once it's too simple. I'll be pleasantly surprised if Workflowy can crack this nut.

I also use Notational Velocity on the Mac. I sync with the iPad/iPhone app SimpleNote. The great thing is that sync'ing is automatic in each app. Now all of my ideas and notes are always on whatever device I have at hand. I tried EverNote for a while but it got in the way for quickly updating existing notes, IMHO.

I think it comes down to how a given user works and thinks. Personally, I agree with you about hierarchy (my app doesn't have it and the issue comes up periodically) but I know some that need it. I'm often amazed at how such a simple problem (managing tasks) is solved in such different ways, each which suits one subset of the population!

Sometimes the tool is irrelevant. I have one friend who used a directory structure and text editor (pretty simple) to create an enormous cluster of tasks he'd never get to. Many thousands, like the Windows registry after a couple years of random software installs. His issue was just needing a mechanism to periodically clean it out, so a change in approach rather than a different tool.

Thanks for the Notational Velocity suggestion, it looks nice (link: http://notational.net/).

The extraneous Japanese writing on their page is unbelievably tacky though. I can't figure out what they were thinking. Was it supposed to look cool? It just says mundane things like "Download" or "How to use the program." Not a good impression...

Have you tried Evernote? How does it compare?

I've been using Evernote for the past few weeks, and it's becoming a regular part of my day. I can read, write and search notes through both my computers and my phone (Nexus). Aside from some UI strangeness/ugliness I'm very happy with it.

I really like using Onenote with notebook saved on skydrive, I have been able to have the native app on my windows machines and the webapp when I am on the go. Also, there is a really good looking WP7 app now (though I have used it yet)

What do you recommend for those of us that run Linux on the desktop, not MacOS?

On linux and before discovering NV I was always snapping back to plain old vim (one big text-file).

It's been years since I switched to OSX, though. Perhaps there are worthwhile dedicated apps on linux now (back then I didn't find any).

I'm hearing that 'zim' is the thing, but am trying to figure out how it can be made to easily sync across machines.

Haven't used Zim, but looks at least a little like Tomboy, which has several options for synchronization, using a local folder (Dropbox?), SSH, WebDAV and something they call Tomboy Web. I don't love Tomboy, but it's easy and functional enough that I actually use it.

Are people really okay with both giving lots of details about what they are working on to an untrusted third party and committing to a tool that may uncontrollably change or disappear depending on what the maintainer decides to do with it?

I suppose I could use it for hobby projects. For work stuff, untrusted third parties having a free view at my workflow is just straight out, so there goes one big use for the system.

For everyday household stuff, my TODO list could be leaking medical and financial information, which is again a privacy problem. At the very least I would have to make sure both my account info and the contents of the tasks were carefully scrubbed of any identifying information. Seems like troublesome enough that I'd probably give the thing a pass in this situation too.

Our users are saying that they use it for work and pretty much everything. Also, we allow easy exporting of your whole list, so you're not going to lose all your data.

There's a simple solution to this problem -> realising that it is surprisingly easy for anyone with the interest to track you around town as you do your stuff and to plant bugs in your office. The info they get that way is much more useful and detailed than anything you ever write down on a TODO list.

If they're just reading your stuff as a passing curiosity because they accidentally can, then they are not a threat as they have no use for the information.

There's a simple solution to this problem -> realising that it is surprisingly easy for anyone with the interest to track you around town as you do your stuff and to plant bugs in your office.

This is completely false. There might be a handful of people with the time and willingness to do this who also find themselves in a suitable location. There are probably hundreds of thousands who could do it on the internet.

I guess I don't understand the analogy in the title. How is workflowy any more "distributed" than a to-do list? I mean, instead of carrying around my notebook of ideas and to-dos, I put it all on workflowy. It seems like I've traded one centralized system for another.

That's not to say that workflowy doesn't have advantages over a notebook, but the svn/git analogy is flawed in my opinion. Maybe if they'd compared other task management systems to cvs and workflowy to svn the version-control-system analogy would have fit better.

EDIT: Grammar.

I have been using Workflowy for about 2 weeks now and have a 2 week history of things I have done, didn't get completed and meeting notes.

I love that I can keep all of this in one place without worrying too much about formatting.

I like the look of it (and the intuitive way it functions) - but (even though my fear maybe irrational) I'm slightly worried about becoming dependent on a tool that might not be around in the future.

EDIT: actually, with an export function - there's not so much to lose.

Yeah, I echo this worry. I wish I could pay for this.

Not sure if investors are going to be interested in this given the fairly narrow focus of the feature set and potential market. That being said, I think these are the things that make the service so great. Adding much in the way of features in order to increase potential market could ruin its awesomeness.

Hi Chris. We have simple export working now and we're working on regular, automated exports of your whole document.

Thanks. I'm not so much worried about my data as I know that can be easily exported already.

I'm more worried about becoming reliant on the interface and product as there really isn't anything else like it out there.

Totally rooting for you guys and will love to follow your success.

What's embedded on this guy's blog? It's using a massive % of cpu.

Heh, this question gets posted every time something from my blog appears on HN.

It's a live-chat tool for websites that I'm testing for a friend and his startup. Honestly it's proving pretty useless with the kind of traffic I'm getting (high churn), but on websites with videos or long posts it's pretty awesome.

Well it crashed my browser (Chrome 6 on W7) and caused me to not read your post, might want to rethink it as it ruins any attempt at using your site.

same here. crashed chrome on w7 (an extra data point)

Definitely reproducible. Chrome on w7 crashed for me as well.

No worries now, the traffic shut his site down.

same on chromium/ubuntu

somethings gotta be wrong with that plugin

Looks pretty similar to BasKet (http://basket.kde.org/).

I used BasKet for a while and it's pretty good. Ultimately though using TODO lists for non-computer tasks on a computer always breaks down for me.

Also, this doesn't seem particularly distributed. How is this like git? There are better ways of saying "it's neat and new".

I meant like git in that it makes branching and such painless. It's not distributed at all as far as I can tell.

And yes I agree, if the checklist isn't tightly bound to the workspace it's meant for, everything breaks down. But being a founder of a web/mobile startup means pretty much everything I do happens on a computer.

I switched my homepage to Workflowy when I saw it first here on HN and it has been a great boost to my productivity since. Maybe nothing specific to Workflowy itself, but just the fact of having a todo list as homepage.

I made a simple HTML page with a large font that said "You're working on XYZ" and set it to be my home page. Embarrassingly, I was very productive that week.

Even though I didn't keep up with updating the HTML to represent what I was working on, I became much more aware of my actions and their relations to my responsibilities since then.

I found it to be a valuable lesson.

I did the same, and it's proven very useful so far. I also started to use it as my journal.

that is such a good idea. Just made my list as my homepage. Let's see how it works out for me. I use W7 Sticky Notes which comes very handy for boosting productivity too.

I've also tried lots of different tools.. The best one so far is to stop spending time thinking and writing tasks and just start executing them.

Workflowy looks interesting, but the part of the marketing that turns me off is that there is very little information available without signing in, instead we see a video. The video makes claims of being "the first" in a lot of things, but the demo shows workflowy off as a crippled version of mind-mapping software, which honestly makes me think they haven't done their homework.

I just noticed workflowy has an export tool at the bottom of the page. Pretty slick.

Yep, that's nice. I'd also like to be able to import from gTasks.

Historically I'm not a guy who likes "fancy" note-taking or TODO-tracking tools. I tend to prefer things like vi or TextMate. That said, I played with WorkFlowy last night and I really liked it. I think it provides a very useful kind of tool experience. Scratchs a useful itch. I was surprised. The only thing that I don't like is I'm uncomfortable with it being a webapp hosted by some company. I'd much much much prefer it if I could run a native app version of WorkFlowy, with my data stored in a file on my own computer. And if it's stored in a file(s) that I control, then I could, say, use something like DropBox or git or rsynch or TimeMachine or TrueCrypt or whatever to make sure that data is shared or backed up or encrypted exactly how I want or need. Right now if the WF company goes away or I have no connectivity, I can't access my data. (I'm aware of their "copy-and-paste out" feature but that doesn't address this particular problem, and is hacky and will be prone to having out-of-date data stored in your backup cache. And it's too manual.) This is my only negative with it so far. Otherwise, I think the UI is great and I think it's really useful for certain cases. Possibly a killer app for those use cases. Turn this into a native app for Mac with all my data stored locally wherever I wish, with no connectivity requirements, and you can put me down for a purchase. Great work!

I also want to throw a shout out to Notational Velocity. First time I've heard of it was in this discussion thread. Just played with it now. Also like it. Nice use cases supported. I can see this really being useful. It's a different beast than WorkFlowy so I don't think they compete, they are complementary or orthogonal tools, at best. I could see using both. Couple advantages I see with NV are (1) native app, (2) open source, and (3) it stores your data locally where you control it and own it. NV does not have the cool collapsible hierarchical bullet point UI mechanism that WorkFlowy has, however, so again they don't really compete directly or scratch the same itch. The 100%-keyboard-drivability aspect is awesome and very useful. I wish I could control the font size, the default is uncomfortably small.

Anyway, glad I discovered this thread, and I'll be adding both of these tools to my toolbox going forward. Kudos to the folks behind both.

Workflowy reminds me of google tasks. Simple tasks easily indented.

Right. The advantage of Google tasks over Workflowy in my opinion, is that Google tasks works on mobile devices.

502 Bad Gateway

I would love to run something like this on my personal webserver.

Is there any free software solution that provides such a web solution? (I've played with various wikis for a while but it never was never 'addictive' enough.)

I've been using TiddlyWiki for some months successfully:

http://www.tiddlywiki.com/

Very simple (single HTML file, web server not required), local, lightweight, can sync with Dropbox easily.

For teams, we're heavily using the Open Source version of Etherpad. Not a wiki, but a great collaborative text editor.

todo.sh + Dropbox is working well for me. On every computer I want, easy editing via mobile devices, plaintext.

Very much looks like a nicely done but nevertheless small subset of emacs org-mode for the web.

I'll stay with org-mode: - I'm in emacs all day anyway. - Much more feature rich: priorites, dates, coloration, etc. - Full editing (duh) capabilities. Cut&paste to shuffle things around. Key combos for everything. Fingers never leave the keyboard.

Since I maintain the file in git I check it in and out from anywhere on any system. Full version history as well.

Still Workflowy is nicely done for what it is.

I feel old-fashioned. I still use a piece of paper and a pen to jot down ideas. Not a fancy Moleskine book either, just one or two Sheets of A4 folded twice. I feel productive.

What do you think is the secret for Workflowy's success? Is it the novelty? The geekiness? The design? Stuff like that fascinates me, because I don't really need it. How am I to discover what people like if I wouldn't use it in the first place?

I am absolutely loving this site. I am not normally a list person but I am going to try. If they ever add collaboration then I will be all over this.

Workflowy looks... almost identical to Google Tasks.

I think you're more likely to stick to and maintain todos on a mobile device that syncs to the cloud.

Maybe that's just how I'm wired, but I never could stick to any one system until I got a smartphone, now I run my life out of it.

In the WorkFlowy Help section at the bottom it says:

What we're working on: Mobile (iPhone, iPad, Android), export & backup, collaboration & sharing, better moving, and about a million other small improvements.

That is what I am waiting for. I want access to my TODOs anywhere, otherwise I will lose things or have a hard time looking things up.

Looks like it's pretty new. They're still calling it a "beta". Maybe the mobile apps are coming next?

I like Workflowy. However, I'm used to jumping between words using ctrl+arrow keys. When I do that in Workflowy, I'm taken a level up or down. It's very hard to get used to.

If Workflowy also produced a time tracker - to monitor how long Workflowy tasks took (and record which task I've been working on, and when) .. I'd pay money for it.

I've been working on a similar project, but I've been moving away from the tree structure lately because I found it too rigid.

I don't think all my ideas fit into a tree.

It's a top-down approach. The question is, can your ideas be subdivided into small(er) tasks?

What if my ideas are smaller parts of different things (i.e. a cycle, which can not be in a tree)?

Maybe I'm thinking about it the wrong way.

A cycle is a linear process, which is repeated. You can take the (x) steps of your cycle and make a heading out of each, and then divide those stages into their smaller steps.

Vimoutliner does the same - letting me use a real text editor. With dropbox or sshfs synching is a no-brainer, too.