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Comment by kkowalczyk | Hacker News Reader

Workflowy (https://workflowy.com/), which is a web-based outliner. Good because it's fast.

Me too. I'll second the opinion of others and mention that paper is hard to beat, but for me paper happens at either end of the idea (jotting a quick note in my notebook/whatever paper is around, and later sketching layouts/business models/user flows/etc to flesh things out) while Workflowy happens in between.

Most good ideas happen when I'm in the middle of another project. By the time I'm able to devote any serious thought to it I've already gone through five notebooks and oodles of scrap paper, so I make a point of entering at least the basic elements of every idea into Workflowy the same day that I initially write it down on paper. Then I have a searchable record, and it's really easy to expand on various points in five-minute chunks or on sleepless nights. That way, whenever I'm looking for a new project I have a bank of ideas to pull back out onto paper.

I also use Workflowy to keep track of goals and sort of the "big picture" TODOs.

This looks like a great tool.. but for these kind of sites, I always feel uncomfortable to signup and then store my personal information in their databases. I could easily end up giving them my personal ideas and my professional work related stuff.. We really don't know who is looking at our data on other side and what kinda security measures(if any) they are taking to secure the same. Your thoughts?

Interesting point about privacy. Does anyone else have similar concerns?

I am of the opinion that life is too short to worry, plus people generally aren't able to steal ideas. Execution is always very different. Look at the Xerox-Apple-Microsoft implementations of GUIs... All very different.

My ideas start on napkins or Notes on the iPhone, get translated to Workflowy and then fully drafted and edited into a blog post: http://rayhano.com

The hope is others take the ideas and use them with their own. Ideas should be free, only then can society benefit.

Sharing explicitly versus gaining access to your data are completely separate things. Moreover, how about pushing your professional data to these sites? I don't want to use separate tools for ideas which I'm fine if someone steals them and which not..

A valid point. I've been using Workflowy for a few months (I'm a long-time "outliner aficionado" who has happily jumped into using this tool with both feet due to some HN postings), and when it comes to entering work/professional data, I make small efforts to obfuscate key items. But some cannot be obfuscated w/o invalidating the content itself...

I haven't been sufficiently concerned/motivated to investigate their privacy policy further.

[edit:] https://workflowy.com/privacy/ may raise concerns; I need to review this policy later (and compare it to those of other free services such as Google which I also use).

I've been using WorkFlowy for almost a year now, and it has soon become one of my "Pinned Tabs" because I use it every day. It's the most flexible tool I have found to literally organize my brain. Since there are no predefined rules how to organize your stuff in WorkFlowy, you can use it just as individually as your thinking works. The great mobile version of the website is useful for using it on the go.

I love those products that look minimalistic and trivial on first sight but that are feature-packed underneath for power users: full keyboard use, sharing, search & tags, copies/templates, "hidden" timestamps, ...

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