Everything in your life is just a list | Hacker News Reader

Everything in your life is just a list

slate.com

112 pointsjessep78 comments

How do I say this without incurring the wrath of people here on HN... Is this not what pg was talking about in this article? http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

This entire thing appears to be just a paid advertisement.

Haha. I'm a WorkFlowy founder. A few people have thought this because it is so positive, but it really isn't. The author just contacted me on Twitter saying, "I'm gonna write a story about you, cause I love your product" and then called and did an interview. I guess he really just likes it.

I am a free user of WorkFlowy and I absolutely love it for the work I do on it. I don't use it for the list or a to-do, I use it to take and organize notes for the certification I intend to complete. Although I know that I can use the bullets in MS Word or anywhere but I love how smooth and time-saving it is in Workflowy.

I wish I could use it but the company I work for doesn't like us putting our data in external providers' servers. You should make a downloadable version that uses the browser's own backing store, or something. I'd pay for it! (I know this is probably not a high priority request.)

As a pro WorkFlowy user, I understand where he is coming from. I've often wondered what you could do improve the product but I haven't been able to think of anything (yet).

Ha, thanks (I work on it). Both for the comment and for upgrading to pro. There's still like a bajillion things we can do to improve it. A few big features, but a bajillion smaller usability improvements that add up to a really big deal.

My first development job was on MORE, shortly after Dave Winer sold it to Symantec, and your product comes as close as anything I've seen to the feel of that product. As I'm sure you know, it had a fanatical following.

Even though I probably won't be able to use it for my day job, I'll buy a license and toast your future development!

:) Thanks so much. Yeah, it's really interesting that after the golden era of outliners, none of them still exist in a big way.

Could you add some simple formatting (markdown)?

Just curious- was Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico Philosophicus in any way an influence on WorkFlowy?

I ask because the propositions in the Tractatus are organized exactly like lists are in WorkFlowy.

PG's article was about sneaky PR for a given company/product that disguises itself as 'news.'

This is neither sneaky or disguised. It's literally just an advertisement for a product.

It's actually just a normal, genuine review of a product :)

Any positive review is an ad. That's why products that are well-liked are popular.

Not true, an ad is paid for by the company producing the product.

Pff, that just depends on the definition of 'ad', but in my experience your definition is not in line with how most people interpret and use the word 'ad'. When I tell my friend how great these sneakers are for wearing, are those words an 'ad' for Nike? No, generally only those messages for which the beneficiary of commercial success of the product under consideration has paid for are defined as 'ads'.

ad·ver·tise·ment/ˈadvərˌtīzmənt/ Noun: A notice or announcement in a public medium promoting a product, service, or event or publicizing a job vacancy.

An 'ad' doesn't have to be paid for. And connotations are not definitions.

The article isn't quite promoting anything. It's saying "I like this product", not "buy this product".

>An 'ad' doesn't have to be paid for. And connotations are not definitions.

Language changes.

I don't know anyone who refers to unpaid positive reviews as advertisements--doing so just confuses people.

My definition of an ad: Ad is a piece of information trying to convince people to spend money. Ads usually do this by lying (sometimes implicitly, subconsciously - i.e. beautiful women in deodorant ads create an association in the viewers mind between beauty and this particular deodorant).

A piece of information whose primary purpose is to inform, is not an ad (even though it looks like it). This includes, for example, most concert "ads" - a notification about an upcoming Parov Stelar concert informs his fans (= people who already want to go to such a concert) where they can fullfil their desires. It does not create new desire, e.g. by lying that there will be metal music played as well.

Apologizes, I didn't mean 'advertisement' as in 'CLEARLY SOMEONE BRIBED THE AUTHOR OF THIS ARTICLE' -- just that, yes, it was someone writing with the intention of persuading others to use it.

Normally I'd agree, but I trust both Slate and Farhad Manjoo.

Sometimes, there is no conspiracy. HN's become rather cynical now.

I believe the phrase is "advertorial", this is nothing more than a product plug padded out to satisfy a word count quota. This is not, in any sense, "Hacker News", there is no product comparison and nothing other than gushing praise. Workflowy must be pleased with themselves.

All Glory to the Church of Org.

Kidding aside, they did a great job with workflowy. I still only use org mode, but I've suggested it to several people who wouldn't be comfortable with emacs, and they've all loved it.

org-mode + mobileorg + git = my entire life.

So can mobileorg synchronise via git now?

No, but the android mobileorg does do ssh/scp, so you can have a "dumb" version of git support.

I have a post-receive hook that updates the working copy with git checkout. `git push` is all I have to run, so to me it _feels_ like git support :)

Here is the link to the android version - https://github.com/matburt/mobileorg-android/

If any of those people are comfortable with vim, they could try VimOrganizer ( http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=3342 ) -- a vimscript implementation of org-mode. (There's a few other implementations including one based on workflowy, but VimOrganizer happens to be the one I've started using.)

Self-plug: I've been working on a similar outline app for about 3 years now: https://zetabee.com/text/

I made it because I was doing something very similar in my text editor all the time, especially with collapsing/expanding sub-lists. It has pretty decent keyboard support and very few unnecessary features. I was going to build a 'check' completed feature but I've realized I just don't care about things I've already done. I only care about what's next. So Control+Del to delete a line is enough. It is a slightly opinionated app but being mostly plain-text with indents, you can use it however you want.

I don't plan on making money with it and it has near zero operating cost. So it's free/secure/unlimited and will remain so forever.

Emacs' org-mode is pretty much the same philosophy. Not quite as simple, though.

"... The biggest problem with all of them is that they don’t support flexible data structures—they don’t let you define things how you want,..."

Just halved the audience.

When I read this I think of Hawking, "A Brief History of Time" & the advice his editor to remove equations. Does the same hold for Comp Science references? (Must resist the urge to talk CS in main-street press. Must resist the urge to talk CS in main-street press...)

Discovered WorkFlowy last year, wrapped the page in an Android WebView and put it free in the market. Seeing a huge boost in downloads today. It's already tripled my best day yet, almost a 10% increase in active installs.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.codysand.f...

And WorkFlowy is ok with that?

It's been in the Android Market for 10 months now. They've almost certainly seen it. I'm obviously not taking credit for what they've created. Just wanted an app that would allow me to use it full-screen. Thousands of others did, too. It's free, no ads. Was just becoming familiar with the Android SDK at the time, and whipped it up in an hour.

Yeah, we're aware of it. Basically, we plan on doing an Android app but haven't had time yet. No reason to squash something that's helpful to people.

I appreciate that. Please contact me should it ever become a problem.

I thought this was about Lisp.

I thought it would provide a sound reason to learn Lisp.

(cadaddadadddar life)

Nutella

Workflowy people: Please please please provide an API. I like your tool, but 99% of the time I'm doing something I need to make a todo, I need to do it somewhere other than looking at your web page. For example, from within vim. Or at the command line. Or while checking email. A nice API would allow me to whip up tools that make it super easy to access from wherever.

Other than that, very nice tool :)

We do want to make an API, but we think it would be irresponsible based on our current organizational status. We're still in scrappy-two-person-startup mode, and we don't want to do the poorly supported, unstable API thing.

But yeah, it's clearly important.

Hah, mine is a directed acyclic graph!

What do you use?

An outline is technically a tree. Each node can have zero or more children. Since children cannot link to any node other than their own children, there are no cycles. Since each children cannot refer to their parent, the graph is directed. (Technically, all acyclic graphs must be directed, as a bidirectional link would result in a two-node cycle. But if you don't count those...)

A list would either be a zero or more equal-rank siblings, or a tree where each node had exactly one child. Since that's not how most people take notes, technically they are using a directed acyclic graph rather than a list.

In conclusion, words differ in meaning depending on context :)

for full generality a dag would require that a node be able to have multiple parents :)

you can list it by a topological sort.

i wish mine were acyclic.

Sounds like Emacs org-mode for non-geeks.

I absolutely love Workflowy. It has replaced every piece of software I have used in the past for todos.

I actively recommend it to my coworkers. Is just fantastic.

Thank you. Really, thank you.

I offload my brain to Workflowy once a day. It's awesome, but it would be better if they had to mobile app I could use to reload my brain on the move ;)

Is there anything more to Workflowy than an outliner with search capability? Outliners have been around for decades.

You could say the same about absolutely anything. You have to try it to appreciate how much of a positive impact it can have on your life/plans/schedule. I cannot function without a detailed outline. Every single thing I do - personal, work, long-term projects, social obligations, house chores - is part of an outline. It's nice to be able to offload your brain to an app that will remember it forever so that you can concentrate on better things. I even take minutes in real-time during all meetings in the form of nested outlines.

Plus, Matt Cutts uses Workflowy. So you have to wonder how much of an impact a good outline can have on the world!

Yeah, I like outliners. I've used them since the DOS days. I just wanted to know how this one is better/different than what's currently out there. The fact that it's web-based isn't new.

i.e. http://thenextweb.com/2008/10/22/online-outliners/ (2008)

The article starts with "For as long as I’ve been using computers, I’ve been searching for the perfect way to take digital notes" and then the author went through a list of popular tools previously evaluated and this made me think the author was going to talk about a new kind of tool.

Anyways, it's good that this article will expose people to outliners (and awesome Matt Cutts is using one).

Tried it out, it's pretty smooth and 'flowy' (due to the little slick animations). Nicely done :)

I like how you kept it simple, clean and straight forward. Hope you don't over complicate it in future versions by bombarding it with due dates, try to implement bill payment features, calendars, etc etc. I just want a list!

David Allen commenting on productivity tools says that, in essence, all you need is the ability to create and maintain lists.

In Evernote I have a bunch of notes. One is called 'Projects', one is called 'someday maybe' one is called 'stuff' and then there are a batch of context notes, office, home, etc all the usual GTD notes.

Each of these notes is a list. So when I open evernote, what I see is a list of lists. I find this depth of nesting optimal.

It works great. I mainly use it on my phone but, of course, it's available on my PC.

I use evernote only because it means I have an online backup and if I change my phone there's no messy data transfer to arrange.

Used in conjunction with Google calendar it supports GTD perfectly.

I have tried a lot of GTD apps and none beats the simplicity of this when it comes to supporting GTD methodology

I use http://www.checkvist.com/, fully keyboard-driven interface with all sorts of perks. Haven't compared it directly to Workflowy, just putting it out there. No affiliation.

Thanks for the link. I'd never heard of CheckVist or WorkFlowy. Having just tried them both, CheckVist is certainly more feature rich (due dates, formatting, multiple lists etc) whilst still being simple and keyboard driven.

Something similar that comes to mind is TaskPaper (http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/taskpaper/) [Mac Only] that does things very similar to Workflowly. Minimal, short-cut driven, supports tags with powerful search capabilities.

That, along with Dropbox to save the .taskpaper files, and you are good to go. It even has a iPhone app (Haven't used that yet).

I'm a paid user of WorkFlowy, love it. The hash tags and @person references are really useful for working on shared workflowys. What we really need next though, is a way to transform the nested "mind map" (which is useful for getting stuff out of your head) to a flat time-series of tasks. Two different steps in the process: dumping your thoughts and then executing the tasks.

I'm building a discussions platform that works in a similar fashion to workflowy. I guess you could say it's a collaborative workflowy. for Check it out: http://ec2-50-16-106-77.compute-1.amazonaws.com/

I think the idea of infinitely nested lists are useful for many things. The tree structure is quite powerful.

I really like what you did there. Looking forward to see what comes out of it.

Not in Emacs Org mode?

I found workflowy a few months ago. Used it for a while, and realized how useful it is for me. More-so than any todo list or mindmap ever was.

I went pro 2 weeks ago. Worth every penny. Hope they keep up the good work.

Only wish it worked better on WP7's browser, but thats probably MS' fault more than Workflowy's

needs 2 way syncing with org-mode.

Do they have a REST API? It should be pretty easy to write clients if they do.

I would love that. I've never been able to get the workflow right with mobileorg...

One big problem: a picture is worth a thousand words, and there is no photo capabilities.

If you're looking for a REALLY non-complicated list app, check out http://minimalist.ngokevin.com which makes use of local storage and app cache to work offline.

Reminds me of a list version of a mindmap -- which is great. I am addicted to mindmaps to organize my thoughts but navigating the elements by panning around a giant map can get cumbersome. Looks like a good alternative.

I simply refuse to look at websites that slap a giant-ass ad thing across my screen before letting me access their content. (on iPad/Chrome)

More > http://www.omnigroup.com/omnioutliner

Wow! Congrats to the Workflowy people!

I'm a paid user of WorkFlowy and love it...now if it only worked in the browser on Windows Phone!

Go Workflowy! Love this thing.

It is good.

how do you do due dates or start dates on your todos?

i usually add a tag #Date

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