Using WorkFlowy as a Project Management Software

Unorthodox, yet effective

My interaction with workflowy began on a personal level and I instantly fell in love with it.

It was just so simple and intuitive and really allowed me to map out my brain effectively — very soon I was an addict. By using workflowy for my personal ideas it naturally progressed into my team using it, until eventually it just naturally took over as the defacto software that we used to manage all our projects. Here are some reasons why it works and what makes it effective:

#1. Deeper and deeper

For me, the most logical way to look at any set of data is from the top down, i.e: I want to be able to see the birds eye view of things and then zoom in & zoom in until I get to the level of detail I need.

This is incredibly important. Being able to instantly understand the set of data and focus on whats important is incredible and easily workflowys biggest strength.

It fosters focus.

Our workflowy if exported would probably be a 1000+ page book, but instead, its a easily usable, logical sorted set of data funnels that take you down to where even Alice in Wonderland hasn’t been.

#2. Exportable & shareable

Alright, its nice that you can organize your brain — but what about others? Workflowy’s export function is really useful. Now, obviously such a software would allow for a simple export of the data, copy + paste + email etc but it goes further. I can actually share a link to just a single item, and the person with that link can edit the contents of that item and only that item along with all items within it.

This is immensely cool.

You can grant access to subcontractors/partners to edit a living and breathing organism.

As a result, you don’t have to deal with versions of files, revisions, miscommunications and its still a very central location for organization.

#3. Hashtags

This is another really cool feature that was neatly incorporated into the service. For example, #discuss or #design. By running a simple #discuss search query I get a filter of what remains to be discussed. Upon completing it — it is marked as complete and hides in the background until called for again.

Similarly, a system of hashtags can be agreed upon describe the different items within the project.

#4 @person tags

Similar to the hashtags — person tags are also really cool. For example, there is an item: “Write Home Page Text”. @peter @dmitri @timur #discuss

This means that this item pertains to the 3 people listed. It makes it easy for me to filter whats currently on my table. For example, I run @timur and get all the items which I am involved with currently.

In conjunction with the hashtags — this becomes extremely powerful if used in the right hands.

#5 Completed Tasks — Show vs. Hide

Finally — an awesome feature of workflowy is the ability to eliminate noise with the power of archiving useful information through marking an item as ‘complete’.

Lets say I have <Design login popup @peter @timur #design #discuss>

Within that item, I would have another 50 sub items dwelling deeper into the essence of this item. Eventually this popup will be designed. (marked as complete, gets hidden). Eventually, this popup will be redesigned, at which point having notes about the logic behind the original one would be kinda useful. “Complete > Show” — its back in the workflowy.

The moral of the story is — every project is a large set of to-do lists and some kind of collaborative discussion and idea contribution. Basecamp does a decent job, but I still don’t like the format. It reminds me of a forum. No doubt there are a million ways to solve this pain, but I think workflowy as a tool for team collaboration is really underestimated.

No Label Inc. is a digital collective currently focused on creating dive advisor.