If you're looking for a fresh way to organize your notes, ideas and to-do lists at the start of this new year, Workflowy is an excellent option.
Workflowy is a simple outlining tool that works in any browser or as an app on your device: Mac, Windows, Linux, Android and iOS.
At first glance, it’s a simple note-taking tool focused around bullet lists. It lacks the menu overkill of Microsoft Word or the complexity of Adobe software. It just puts a bullet point in front of you and nudges you to start writing stuff down. Within a bullet point, you can put sub-bullets. And each of those sub-bullets can have its own sub-bullets. And so on.
Try out this example list to get a feel for it. 👈
You can use Workflowy to organize ideas, notes, tasks, writing drafts or anything else. When I use it, I find myself less tempted to twiddle around with formatting than when I’m using fancier tools like Notion or Craft, though I love those for designing fancier documents.
It’s free to use. Power users can pay $49 annually for some bonus features, like backing up to Dropbox. Paying also gets you more space to upload stuff, though I don't use Workflowy to store files or documents, so that isn't a big feature for me.
Workflowy has been around since 2010, but this past year it's added a bunch of new capabilities.
Here are five useful new features ✋
Mirroring 🪞
You can create a mirror copy of a bullet and paste it into a different spot. No matter where you edit a mirrored bullet, those changes show up anywhere the bullet appears. That's useful when you have a key fact, stat, quote, phrase or other bit of text that you refer to often. Just update it once and all the other uses of it will also be automatically corrected.
Colors 🌈
Organize topics, sections or list types by color to make it easy to scan for what you need. Tasks can be one color, ideas another and facts a third. Or color-code by subject, importance, or urgency.
Kanban 🎛
Sometimes it's helpful to view lists in columns rather than as a stream of bullet points. Here’s how to make the most of these vertical columns. This kind of organization is popular in apps like Trello, Airtable, and Asana. Now you can use it in Workflowy to move notes around by dragging them, enabling a more visual editing process.
Links 2.0 🖇
Notes apps traditionally organize stuff in hierarchical folders. Some new apps instead use backlinks. Instead of putting stuff into specific folders, you just tag stuff and all references to that book, person or whatever else are auto-collected onto a special page for that entity. That’s useful for seeing every reference to a particular person or book or place without having to manually put those things somewhere. Backlinking is a core feature of popular new note-taking platforms like Obsidian, Roam, and Mem.
Templates 📄
Given that more than 3 million people use Workflowy, you can benefit from their experience with the library of Workflowy templates. It's new this year. It’s tiny, and primitive compared to the vast collection of Miro templates or free collections of Notion templates, Trello templates, Coda templates or Airtable templates. But it's still handy as a starting point.
To start, check out Workflowy templates for bullet journaling, writing a creative brief, content planning, and meeting notes.
Better yet, just start with your own blank page and make your own template. Later on you’ll be able to reuse your own preferred structure whenever you're jotting down ideas, tasks or writing a first draft.
Helpful features
Share any list you create as a viewable or editable page. Recipients don’t have to have an account or log in.
Export Workflowy notes to use elsewhere.
Update notes on the go from your phone with the free app.
Resources 🧰
Watch this 2-minute intro video for a quick overview. Workflowy’s YouTube channel has lots of other helpful videos as well.
Read this short blog post from fan Jonathan Wylie for why he loves it.
Check out the app’s useful how-to pages for short, step-by-step guides
A smart blog post on blending paper and digital notes with Workflowy
Limitations 😞
It's a simple note-taking tool. No fancy databases like Notion, Coda or Airtable. You can't easily sort, filter and reorganize big batches of info, though you can drag bullets around easily.
No cool preview cards like Craft. If you paste in a link, you won't see a content preview, unless it's a YouTube or Twitter link. Those are helpful, but it would be great to show page previews for content from elsewhere online.
You can't yet email content into Workflowy, as you can with other services like Evernote, Trello and Mem.ai. You can bring in info with the Chrome Web clipper.
Fewer advanced features for power users than Roam, Mem or Obsidian
Alternatives 🎈
For laying out ideas visually, mind mapping tools like Whimsical are great.
For research projects or long writing projects, Scrivener is ideal. Read my post for more.
For note takers experimenting with newer tools, one of my primary tools is Roam (Read my post about why I like it). Mem is a great option as well, as I'll detail in a future post.
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Stars in the Workflowy Club 🤩
💻 p.s. If you’re looking for a new job opportunity in 2022, or know someone who is, apply by January 9 to join my team at the Newmark Grad School of Journalism to serve as our program coordinator.
💌 p.p.s. Join me today, Thursday Jan 6 at 2pm ET for a live Twitter Spaces discussion about new approaches to note-taking for 2022. Join the live audio chats any Thursday at 2pm ET in January or February. Just visit @jeremycaplan on Twitter at 2pm.
Thank you for sharing this. Interesting to learn Workflowy. Bullet-based note-taking with backlinks is trendy. I still need to get used to it though... Learning curve is always my concerns.
I personally use Notion and Obsidian for several purposes. Notion has its own web clipper so it's easier for me to collect online resources and organize them. I think I'm using Notion as a database. I know some people use Notion as to share their reading list with the world, and it's an interesting use case. Obsidian is more technical one. With its customizable aspects, it's fun creating my own systems to leave and organize my thoughts. I use Obsidian to keep my daily thoughts.
The only thing that I miss for these note-taking apps is that social aspects. I think I'm a semi-avid reader and sometimes would like to share thoughts with other like-minded people around the content. I think what I'm looking for is like a book club for web articles + like-minded people through my interest. Twitter works good in this way but not specific enough... recently I use Glasp for this purpose and this works good. I can find like-minded people and learn from them.
Sorry for the long comment. Anyway, note-taking is once of my interests and thank you for sharing great insight all the time!
I used workflowy, then moved on to checkvist.com only drawback for me with checkvist is no kanban.. free version is just fine for me.