Ah, no, I lied! Actually, you CAN drag and drop cards between columns (by pressing and holding on the roundel thingy). Wow!

MadaboutDana wrote:

Actually, the kanban feature really IS cool
Wow! That's totally revolutionised the usefulness of Workflowy!

Yes, it does seem to open up some new possibilities. Until now it's never occured to me to categorise each project into just 3 categories (to do, in-progress, and done). Instead, I've been using hashtags for that, and it was predictably a bit of a mess, with long lists developing in the single project category.

I wonder if the column functionality edges us closer to being able to open other bullet-points within those columns (i.e. have a split screen functionality within the same tab, rather than needing to open a whole new window or tab in a browser).

This is where Roam still offers an advantage (the right sidebar).

But if WorkFlowy could open any other bullet point within the column structure, it would trump Roam in that department (though Roam can open multiple notes in that right sidebar, but they are displayed vertically thereon, as opposed to WorkFlowy's horizontally scrollable columns).

Dr Andus wrote:

MadaboutDana wrote:
>Actually, the kanban feature really IS cool
>Wow! That's totally revolutionised the usefulness of Workflowy!

I haven't used kanban much in the past, and I'm not sure if I'm using it correctly, but for now I came up with the following column headings to organise projects to use the new column feature:

- To Do
- In Progress
- Waiting (as in 'waiting for others to do their bit and get back to me')
- Done
- Park & Review ( this is for setting aside things that maybe no longer need getting done, but not 100% sure, so need to review in the future)

Any other implementations out there? Just wondering what else could be done with the new column feature.

Well, I tend to use kanban very loosely for all kinds of categorisation. Your approach is more or less standard (like “Intray”, “To do”, “Doing”, “Done”, “Archived”), but you can use columns for all kinds of things, including cross-references and off-the-cuff analyses, or to author sections of an article side by side (often useful for balancing article content), and so on. There’s no limit to what I’m calling kanban, but is actually just another form of structural model (here in the form of columns + folding, rather than folding on its own).

Dr Andus wrote:

Dr Andus wrote:
MadaboutDana wrote:
>>Actually, the kanban feature really IS cool
>>Wow! That's totally revolutionised the usefulness of Workflowy!

I haven't used kanban much in the past, and I'm not sure if I'm using it
correctly, but for now I came up with the following column headings to
organise projects to use the new column feature:

- To Do
- In Progress
- Waiting (as in 'waiting for others to do their bit and get back to
me')
- Done
- Park & Review ( this is for setting aside things that maybe no longer
need getting done, but not 100% sure, so need to review in the future)

Any other implementations out there? Just wondering what else could be
done with the new column feature.

MadaboutDana wrote:

you can use columns for all kinds of
things, including cross-references and off-the-cuff analyses, or to
author sections of an article side by side (often useful for balancing
article content), and so on.
but is actually just another form of structural model
(here in the form of columns + folding, rather than folding on its own).

Thank you, Bill, you gave me some new ideas there. Yes, it's turning into a column-based outliner almost (a bit like Gingko, I suppose).

Kanban in Roam:

https://twitter.com/RoamResearch/status/1262681514300502018

Luhmann wrote:

Kanban in Roam:
https://twitter.com/RoamResearch/status/1262681514300502018

Thanks for the heads-up. It's weird how suddenly there is this spike in development accross several competitors, implementing similar features, such as kanban in WorkFlowy first and then in Roam, or bi-directional links (and the graph view) in Roam and now in Obsidian / Dynalist, and then Notion going free for personal use...

Perhaps the coronavirus shutdown has something to do with it. Maybe developers are trying to escape boredom by accelerating their innovation (and imitation)?

Anyway, unfortunately this Kanban implementation doesn't play nicely with my favourite CSS dark theme. But I'm not sure if it would replace Trello for me (which I've only just started using again), or even Kanban in WorkFlowy. The space is a bit constricted in Roam.

But still a nice idea and I'm sure it will work for some people.

Ha, I have the same problem - probably using a similar dark theme. But I assume the CSS will be updated soon enough...

New features in Workflowy Beta (https://beta.workflowy.com You have to enable them in settings.

Cloning, so the same item can appear in multiple places in the hierarchy. Editing one edits them all. ("Mirroring" in Workflowy's terminology).

Link editor, so you can create proper HTML links, hiding long, obnoxious ones.

I'm not entirely sold on the implementation, but it's beta.

Mark, where did you learn about these features? I'd like to read about them to better understand use. Thanks!

They haven't written much about it publicly. I found out about it from a mention on Twitter: https://twitter.com/WorkFlowy/status/1275205249549193223

There are barebones instructions on the settings page:

Link editor:

We've all been on the edge of our seats... and finally it has arrived - a magnificent popup for editing your links! To activate it, hover over any link and then click on the icon that will appear. If you're feeling keyboardish, hover over a link and hit Tab.

Mirror items:

This lets you mirror items, you can have a single node in multiple places, search for related options in the item menu to discover that

Cloning is discussed on the forum:

https://workflowy.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360068180652-Transclusion-Cloning-Embedding-is-here-

There's also a mention of plans for the link editor (and bi-directional linking) here:

https://workflowy.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360067774692-Bi-directional-linking

I'm not a part of this but there's a Slack channel where things like this are discussed. From the forum:

if you'd like to join the WorkFlowy Users Group on Slack (where we make early announcements of what we're up to and releasing for testing), please shoot me an email at help@workflowy.com :-)

~Frank

Very helpful, thanks!

I haven't had a chance to try this out yet, but this could possibly be a major step forward: wiki-like internal links and backlinks:

https://blog.workflowy.com/links-version-2/

I will have to take this for a spin before I can confidently say this is a game changer - in terms of WorkFlowy becoming more suitable for a wiki-like Zettelkasten and a real alternative to Roam, but I am intrigued, perhaps even a bit excited :-)

I've tried it and I like it. There is *slightly* more friction than in something like Obsidian/Logseq, because you do have to search for where in the outline to add the item as you are creating it.

Despite that, I find it useful, and it closes a gap in how I would ideally use WorkFlowy. In fact, the power of the combination of mirrors, backlinks, freely creating new items "remotely," and board views recently clicked for me. It's a sort of BrainStorm/Ecco/ConnectedText mashup.

My understanding of what boards can be used for expanded a lot after I stumbled across these videos below. Boards combined with mirrors can be used to create dashboards/overviews of outlines/items from various other places in the master outline. In some ways, this just brings WorkFlowy up to date with what can be done with Notion, Obsidian, etc., but I always really liked the clean interface of WF and actually prefer the non-document approach, so I'm really glad to see more power being added.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8pCAZvJIBvJnW-f4tO3hXjIxZnVMNb13

Also, WF's links/backlinks indeed seems to work well for the daily log approach of Roam, where you freely outline in the daily note and link to other pages to collect those writings on the linked page.

Nice touches are that WF's backlinks show a hierarchy breadcrumb trail over each backlink, you can move the backlinks up and down in the backlinks list, and you can expand/collapse the backlink items.

It's a very nice implementation, esp. with the navigable hierarchy displayed as mentioned above.

Okay, I had a bit of time to play with it. It's definitely a big new feature for WorkFlowy and opens up possibilities that weren't available before.

However, in comparison with Roam, the big difference seems to be that the functionality of a link and its backlink is more of a local and manual process, than a global and automatic one (across the entire database).

What seems to be missing is the automatic search for the given link (as a keyword or phrase) and then the automatic creation of backlinks in every item or document where that linked keyword or phrase turns up.

This is what makes Roam so powerful. Let's hope that this is something that WorkFlowy can catch up with in the future.

WorkFlowy could now work better as a Zettelkasten system, but due to the lack of this automatic global backlink creation, Roam would still be a more powerful option for that.

Here's how such a system could work in WorkFlowy now:

1) Have one area (under one bullet point) for the writing of texts. This would be a writing workspace, as well as a repository of formerly written texts.

2) Have a Zettelkasten under another bullet point - reading notes repository. One could import these notes from elsewhere or start from scratch.

3) Have a References area under another bullet point: essentially a database of all bibligraphic references of sources for the Zettelkasten as well as referred to in the writing area.

Now, as one would be writing a new text in Area (1), you could manually create links to existing references (or create new references), such as e.g. (Smith 2021) would be a link to Area 3, and if you're pulling in a quote or making a reference in the text to a Zettelkasten item, you could manually link from the text to the Zettelkasten item.

Then in the References under (Smith 2021) the backlinks would be displayed to both the article in Area 1, and to the given Zettel in Area 2, and the Zettel would also have a backlink to the text it was linked to from. (So there would be a triangular referencing relationship between the 3 areas.)

I've modelled this and this would work. The only reason I am unlikely to do this right away is that Roam would be still better for such a system, due to the aforementioned fact that in Roam every page containing (Smith 2021) would create an automatic backlink to the original (Smith 2021) item, while in WorkFlowy this would only happen to the specific pages where that singular link was created.

I've been a loyal user of WorkFlowy for many years, though in recent times I've moved some of my activities to Dynalist and Roam.

I could probably terminate my Dynalist subscription but there are still a couple of functions that seem basic and are annoyingly missing from WorkFlowy:

1) a tag pane (like Dynalist has) that would list all tags and the number of times they've been used, allowing them to be sorted alphabetically and by the number of times they've been used.

2) A date stamp for when an item was created and a separate one for when it was last modified (like Dynalist has).

Other nice-to-have features would be the ability to quickly move an item into a specific location directly (like a "go to" function), and the ability to have at least one other pane open in the same tab (like Roam can do).

If it could have an auto-search function to display all linked and unlinked references to an item (or term), like Roam, that would be the cherry on the cake, though if it degrades the speed of the application, I could live without it.

I've put the brakes on with Workflowy at the moment. I made some enquiries about privacy for non US citizen's and have received less than stellar responses. The long and short of it is is that if you are not a US citizen and your data resides on a US server there are no protections in place from the US government requesting your data. This gives non US citizen's no privacy guarantee. It's not something I can trust to put my personal data into. The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruled the GDPR was not sufficient a protection for non-US citizens. This should be a concern for anyone who is not in the US, but has their data stored there.

Dr Andus wrote:

2) A date stamp for when an item was created and a separate one for when
it was last modified (like Dynalist has).

Can't you just type 'now' then tab? I find that's as fast as anything, and can do it whenever and wherever you want.

Dormouse wrote:

Can't you just type 'now' then tab? I find that's as fast as anything,
and can do it whenever and wherever you want.

Thanks for the suggestion, but it's not really the same thing. This solution would require a mental and physical effort to add a date and time stamp manually to every single bullet point, which would make WorkFlowy unusable, as it would visually overwhelm and pollute the content.

Dynalist has a really elegant solution for this, and the date and time stamp for the creation of every bullet point is preserved and displayed alongside the last modified date and time stamp when you hover over the bullet. It's there if you need it, without interfering with the content.

I don't really understand why WorkFlowy doesn't think it's important to preserve the time stamp of the creation of a note. It's an essential parameter of any note.

The lack of it prevents you from conducting certain types of analyses of your historical data and essentially it's a form of data loss. If you accidentally modify a bullet point, you lost the date and time of its creation (unless I'm missing something).

“5 new features that make Workflowy an even better note-taking tool”

https://www.fastcompany.com/90752330/five-new-features-workflowy

Wow, I haven't been on this forum or perused new tools in a while. I've posted a couple times, years ago, about essentially having mini outlines in different table cells. I wasn't thrilled with any suggested options. Boards, like in Workflowy, I think are just what I am looking for.

I have these boards:

Disciplines (stuff I should do every day, week, month, quarter, year)
Weekly -- stuff going on weekly on certain days (sub items for mon, tue, etc with lists under each item)
Events - one-off upcoming events, by month
Projects - larger ongoing stuff
Tasks - one-off things I should do that won't take too much time
This week - quick and dirty scratch pad for the current week)
Today - quick and dirty scratch pad for today).

I whipped all this up in a few minutes, pretty naturally, because it's exactly what I wanted. I tried doing all this in one vertical list but it just didn't jive with my brian. These boards do. I can collapse / expand / zoom in at so many different levels and move / rearrange pretty easily too. I think I will try moving a bunch of stuff from some kind of disorganized Dynalist lists that turned into more like dumping grounds.