Let's find our focus with Workflowy. Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, and today I'm doing something a little differently.
Yes, today I'm gonna be taking a look at Workflowy. It says it's going to help us to break big ideas into manageable pieces, then focus on one piece at a time.
But what makes this different is that I'm going to be reviewing Workflowy in real time. Actually, I've never spent a single second with this application.
So why am I doing this? Well, number one, several of you have actually recommended Workflowy and asked me to review this application.
And number two, I've never actually done this before—actually gone through a product and reviewed a piece of technology in real time. So let's do this.
Everything from the sign-up process to creating our first… I don't know if it's called a note. I don't know what's gonna happen behind this screen.
So I'm going to start out by putting in some email addresses in here. Let's create a password and hit sign up, and let's see what happens with Workflowy.
Let's see how long it takes and if it gives us some introductory information here. I'm gonna say never—let's get our LastPass stuff out of there for now.
Welcome to Workflowy, where you'll just have a blank page. I'm gonna show you what I do here.
It's only turned that way, but you know what, like I like to do with most of my pieces of technology, I just want to dive in and see what happens here. You can see it is a very, very blank screen.
I've got a bullet point here, I've got a little star here on the right, and we've got a little toggle here—Show Completed and Search Home. I guess I can maybe filter by stars, and I've got settings here as well.
This is somewhat what I expected because I believe Workflowy is a brainstorming or mind mapping tool—a great place to get down those quick notes. So here's bullet point number one.
Brainstorm
Here's bullet point number two, and yes, I realize I added some additional fun in that first bullet point. If I hit tab, okay, I can tab and add more notes, additional notes down below.
But I think the real power of Workflowy, if I am not mistaken, is that you can click on these tabs, and look at that—you can go back in and out. So here you can see I'm a few sections deeper into this note.
So here's some additional text, maybe one more bullet point here. One more bullet point—you'll see why I need spellcheck so often here.
But then I think I can go back somehow. So this is notes; what are these arrows doing in here?
There's some way I can get back out of this. I think I can complete it; I can add a note or duplicate it over here.
Additional Notes
What happens if I click on it itself? Hmm… If I hit Home—okay, there we go.
If I hit Home, I go all the way back to the top level, but you notice here there's now a plus sign beside that note. So if I hit that and expand it, now I get some additional notes as well.
Those are those additional notes that I added. I can keep adding them here.
But I think one of the benefits, what a lot of people enjoy about Workflowy, is that you can minimize that. You can go into so much greater detail down below here and then go off on a tangent, right?
You can add additional things here, but if you don't want to see everything else, if I just click on the bullet point itself, now I zoom in. And if I do that again, I think, there we go.
So additional text, more text, even deeper down the trail. All right, so you can go in and out.
Expand Notes
Now you can see the breadcrumbs at the top. I can go back to the notes, okay, and then I can go back to Home.
So here we can see this one is now expanded, so there's even more things that you can expand here as well. Let's take a look.
You'll notice as I hover over these notes, there's a few other things here: Complete, Add Note, Duplicate. Complete—what does that look like?
Let's say if I have completed this one here, I can either hit Ctrl + Enter or Complete. Okay, a strikethrough makes sense, right?
I'm done with that; I can still go in here and edit it, I guess. Now can I change that? If I hit Complete again—there you go, just to undo it.
Okay, so that's what Complete does. What else do we have here? Share—okay.
Duplicate, I think, is pretty straightforward. Adding a note is just gonna add another space down below.
Oh, it didn't add a bullet point that time, so I guess it's adding some further text or further information below that note. But let's go to Share—let's see what that gives us here.
Share Notes
Okay, we can enter in or paste in an email address. We can get a shareable link, and here's a nice and simple toggle: Can we edit this or not?
Back or forth, and then add that person there. I'm not gonna go through with a specific—actually, you know what, let's paste in something here.
I'm gonna use my other Scott Test, or ScottFTest2, Gmail address, and sure, let's say you can edit. And I'm gonna say add—I just want to see what this looks like.
Really, how can I see this later on? I can add more people if I want.
I'm gonna hit X here, so I've added that one there. Can I—okay, there we go.
There's a little different icon there. I have to click on it to see who I have shared it with, but that's how you can share some of these individual notes.
And I'm assuming, the way bullet points and indentation work, that they're gonna be able to have access to everything here, right? If I select this, they're gonna have access to everything down this particular path, so to speak.
Export Delete
Not this bullet point, but of course this one here that says "more text even deeper down the trail." We can export and delete.
Delete looks pretty straightforward. We do have a timestamp at the bottom, so that's interesting—it does keep track of when that particular point was last made or edited.
If I say Export, what kind of options do we have here? Okay, formatted plain text, plain text, or OPML.
Okay, so we can even grab the code if we need to. Plain text removes the formatting, and then we've got some formatting here such as the rounded point.
I guess this is just a simple copy and paste, and then you can put it somewhere else, or there's a click to download button as well. All right, let's star a few things.
Stars look over here on the right, and look at that—when I hit that, something happened down below. Let's hit that again.
If I hit that, there's a home—hmm, interesting. I don't know what that does.
Quick Links
Let's do that with another one. If I've got my cursor over here—no, does that star only appear at the top?
Okay, maybe I need to create a new one, because that seems to be the same as what we saw earlier. If I go here, what if I star that one?
Okay, so now I've got some—it looks like I've got some—they're almost like Quick Links. Ah, I get it—they're sort of like Quick Links down here at the bottom.
So if I put that star—I'm gonna put—let's put another one down. I'm going to zoom into this one, I'm gonna hit the star.
So now you see that I've got some sort of Quick Links down here at the bottom. So if I want to go to some special places—and I guess I have to click that, do I?
If I hit Home—oh, and here's another way. So there's how those stars appear as well.
Now, if I hit the star in the top left-hand corner, I can go directly to those areas as well. I'm not sure how to recreate what we saw down here—do I have to click on this again?
It's almost like you have to double-click it there if I want to see this view, but I guess the intent is that once you've starred what you like, then you'd go up here and go directly to that.
Home, as I've shown before, is just gonna bring you to the highest level. Show Completed—let's mark one off again.
And so in this case, it's showing strikethrough. I'm assuming as soon as I hit this, oh, it's actually gonna hide it—okay, nice.
Okay, so now I can see what I've crossed through here. If I toggle that, it's actually gonna hide it in my bullet point as well.
Search—I'm sure it's pretty straightforward, so I'm not going to even toy with that. And under Settings—some basic undo, redo, and so forth.
So this was a super quick overview of Workflowy, but really interesting here. As you can see, it follows a bullet point path.
And for those of you who may be looking for some type of mind mapping, some way of diving in deeper into your notes, I do like this functionality of being able to hide higher levels.
Minimize Levels
Or, let's do this again—if I keep clicking on those dots—you know, this could be a full page of information, right? This could be a full page of notes, meeting notes, ideas, things that you're thinking about.
But then you can go back up and hide that, right? If we go back to the notes level here, if we want to minimize that, pretty simple—we can just cinch that out.
Let's go back to that home level here
, where we have a bit more of a breakout. And I can just minimize all of that, so I can keep going down with other ideas, other brainstorming options.
And if I need to go and check out what I've done before, I can do so. I can expand this, I can expand that.
So there you have it—a live, real-time review of Workflowy. I'm sure some of you who have used this app before know much more than what I have just seen in these first few minutes.
So if you have some special tips or some ways in which you like to use Workflowy, I'd love to hear from you. Thank you so much for watching today's video.
Be sure to subscribe right here to the channel. Give this video a thumbs up and leave me a comment down below.
Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
