
Workflowy is to TODO as git is to svn  - Swizec
http://swizec.com/blog/workflowy-is-to-todo-as-git-is-to-svn/swizec/1494
======
frio
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.

~~~
lwhi
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.

~~~
frio
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.

------
moe
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.

~~~
astrofinch
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.

~~~
abalashov
Does it allow for easy syncing between multiple machines?

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

~~~
abalashov
Sweet!

------
rsaarelm
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.

~~~
Swizec
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.

~~~
tome
_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.

------
quanticle
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.

------
chrisgoodrich
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.

~~~
lwhi
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.

~~~
chrisgoodrich
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.

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

~~~
chrisgoodrich
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.

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

~~~
Swizec
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.

~~~
citricsquid
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.

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

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

------
burgerbrain
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".

~~~
Swizec
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.

------
bigbang
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.

~~~
evlapix
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.

------
d0m
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.

------
fluidcruft
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.

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

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

------
mkramlich
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.

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

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

------
wnoise
502 Bad Gateway

------
gnufs
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.)

~~~
chorsley
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.

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

------
boskone
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.

------
scrrr
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?

------
paradox95
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.

------
foobarbazetc
Workflowy looks... almost identical to Google Tasks.

------
heresy
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.

~~~
immad
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.

~~~
hartror
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.

------
RaRic
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.

------
lwhi
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.

------
dcdan
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.

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

~~~
dcdan
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.

~~~
lwhi
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.

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

------
pacomerh
I prefer teuxdeux.com, but Workflowy looks good, the export feat is nice

------
wslh
I am surprised... OneNote is one of the best tools out there.

------
RobertKohr
totally needs some collaborating features to be useful for a team.

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jimmyjazz14
the site appears to be down

