WorkFlowy in Action: Stephen Pickering's Rules for Effective Tagging
Stephen Pickering sent us an email explaining his approach to tagging in WorkFlowy. We thought it was pretty interesting, so we might as well share it.
Stephen puts a list of all his tags at the top for quick reference and filtering. After his tags he lays out all the rules he uses to organize his WorkFlowy. This layout allows him to be both consistent in organizing his lists and quick in accessing them. Here's what the top of his WorkFlowy document looks like:
In the relatively near future, we'll make Stephen's job easier by having WorkFlowy compile tag lists for you automatically. No technology, though, can free you from choosing a system to organize yourself and sticking to it, and Stephen's rules seem pretty useful.
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"http://blog.workflowy.com/workflowy-in-action-stephen-pickering #link"
- dates: #sep #oct #nov #dec #2011 #2012
- days: #mon #tue #wed #thur #fri #sat #sun
- to be done on the next eg saturday
- time:
- #soon
- #pending
- Waiting for.
- should have a specific day attached to ensure follow up
- #future
- anything we would like to do in next 3-10 years
- #someday
- anything we are thinking about in next 1-2 years but not definite
- #today
- #hold
- something we would like to do but pending eg money :(
- #priority
- for ongoing stuff not yet given a specific day
- type:
- #project
- all future things requiring research and thought
- may have info added at any time, but once actively progressing is no longer project
- #issue
- all future things requiring thought
- #checklist
- make and keep for repeatable tasks to make it easy next time
- #link
- to useful webpages, can also add phone numbers, emails
- actions:
- #action
- means something is in progress, not completed, without further input
- #call
- #message
- @contact @DenisA @Dan
- add to notes in item
https://workflowy.com/shared/130162e3-49d3-2f53-42b0-74e2365088bf/
I know we can copy the content BUT the structure doesn't transfer cleanly (ie) I have to reset the indent, notes, sub-pages each time
What we really need is to be able to fork (to use github terminology) a shared item in to our own personal workflowy. This would be really powerful because it would pave the way for things like Template Items and collaboration between WorkFlowy users, like with Etherpad. Bonus: be able to pull subsequent changes back and forth between forked items.
To be able to paste the output of the Export Item command into a blank item and have Workflowy parse it into a tree of sub items would be less powerful than Fork Item, but perhaps more manageable to implement.
Already feeling relief after getting my current tasks down - I'm starting to sound like someone promoting a detox - but I'm sure this is going to work - Thanks for the product and thanks steve for the tag definitions
Newbie to this amazing product.
I am judging hard and quickly in my little head to decide if i transfer all my organisation into the tool.
Well i am doing, thing by thing...
One big question is for me the interest to code a tag since the search works the same way with strings or couple, trios,... of strings.
For the moment i cannot see why you need to code @ or # in front of a keyword ?
Please let me know my mistake since i need to swap a lot of data in the tool, and it would be better if the typing is handled allright from the beginning...
Thanks a lot in advance and thank you for the lovely product.
As far as I understand hash tags in workflowy, there are two benefits from prefixing a keyword with @/#:
- to make it possible to simply click on the tag for activating the tag search.
- to mark them visually for faster recognition.
My request for workflowy developers is the following. The biggest thing I miss (not very much, but still it's annoying) is that shared items can not be "included" into your own one. By 'shared' here I mean items shared with you (not by you). This peculiarity makes it impossible to: 1) search the shared items within your own tree; 2) receive email updates on shared items. If this was possible, I'd say that workflowy is literally almost perfect.
And still, workflowy is by far the best organizational tool I've tried. It's changed my approach to personal information management and collaboration. I've completely stopped using Google Wave, Remember the Milk, Google Notebook, Google Docs (except for files handling) in favour of Workflowy. Thank you guys for your great work and talent.
@Goldan We're going to do a lot to improve sharing, including displaying shared lists inside your normal lists. The daily emails in one thread was actually intended that way, because we wanted a single thread where we could look back at our history, rather than having to do a search for WorkFlowy and then look through those.
My question for this post: Can you supply the text from Stephens rules? You've posted an image and I'd much rather just copy/paste them into my own. I like his idea as a foundation of rules for my own lists.
Also, any work pending on including images within the lists?
@workflowy can you provide your rules and search bullets in actual text format as oppose to an image so one can copy/paste it?
any chance of rich formatting? Might be something only visible on the desktop mode, and perhaps something that you access or don't access.
I use workflowy as a document editor. Weird I know, but it works exceptionally well.
This lets us use the google infrastructure, android apps, calendars and more to work with workflowy.