Better Daily Digests – A Splash of Color in your Inbox

I am thrilled to announce some gorgeous improvements to the Daily Digest emails that WorkFlowy has been sending for years now (to those of you that are subscribed). We have made these emails dramatically more useful by adding line level diffs, color coding, and attribution.

One of the best things about making lists is the satisfaction of crossing off items (especially if you are INTJ). The WorkFlowy Daily Digest email includes information about which items were added, changed, moved, completed, or deleted in the past 24 hours. You should receive your email between 8am and 9am in your home timezone.

Inspired by programmer tools like git, we added line-level diffs to the Daily Digest email. This means that if you have edited the content of a bulleted item in the past day, you will be able to see exactly what letters or words were added or removed. This is especially useful for those of you that use WorkFlowy for writing, be it blog posts (e.g this one), books, or screenplays. The value is compounded for shared items where the edits may have been made by someone else (more on this later).

We also added color coding to the Digest Emails, in order to make it easier to see at a glance what has changed. Green for items that were added, red for items that were deleted, gray for items that were completed, and blue for items that were moved.

Finally we added attribution so that you can see the name or email address of the individual who is responsible for each change. This is hugely important if you are using sharing to collaborate with WorkFlowy. When you embed a shared item in your account, your Daily Digest email will include any changes made by you or anyone else in the past 24 hours. For example, if you visit the WorkFlowy Release Notes and click “Add to my Account”, whenever we release an update to WorkFlowy you will see what has changed in your Digest Email.

Likewise, if you have shared any items from your account with friends, family or coworkers, you will see any changes they make in your Daily Digest. I am planning a trip to Japan with some friends and I can see whenever they add items to our itinerary. If you use WorkFlowy for work like we do, you can see when new meeting minutes or tasks are added as well as who added them. By default, attribution uses email addresses, however if you add your name to your account (from the Settings menu), then your name will appear instead.

By now you may be wondering how you can subscribe to these tantalizing emails. I’m glad you asked! Please visit the ‘Settings’ menu (found under the gear in the upper right of the page) and toggle “Send email summaries of changes to my account”. You should receive your first email within the next few hours.

Another feature of these emails that I want to mention is that just like in WorkFlowy itself, every bullet point in the Daily Digest is itself a link. Click on any bullet and it will open to that location in your account. I am especially pleased to announce that as of our latest iOS app update (3.2.4), if you open these links from your iOS device, they will open directly in the app instead of in the browser. This functionality is planned to be expanded to Android and Desktop apps in the near future.

The final thought I want to leave you with is this: While we were getting feedback from beta testers on these new emails, many folks remarked that it would be incredible if this “diff view” could be accessed directly from within the app. That would be pretty incredible, wouldn’t it….

PS – WorkFlowy grows 100% by word of mouth. If you like WorkFlowy please tell your friends about us. If you have a website or blog, please consider writing a post or review about us to help spread the word!