Recently, things in the Workflowyverse have been quiet, a little too quiet. So we decided to poke our heads out and share a bit about what we’ve been up to. And hopefully to make this a regular thing going forward.
What’s New
Despite the rumors, we have not been relaxing on a beach in the Bahamas. Rather, we started this year discussing and planning for the future of Workflowy. For years, Workflowy has been a focused on providing a great single-user experience. Users have naturally shared Workflowy with friends and colleagues and invited them to collaborate. However, this isn’t always a great experience. While we do currently have some collaboration functionality, it’s not nearly as robust or useful as we would like.
We’ve drawn up a plan that we feel will take what is currently a great single-user experience and enable great multi-user experiences. To be clear, this doesn’t mean focusing exclusively on collaboration. Rather, we plan to work on three distinct tracks in parallel – core Workflowy features, collaborative features, and growth.
For collaborative features, imagine taking the fast, minimalist experience of Workflowy and then being able to use that with your entire team or company. In the near future, that’s what we hope to achieve. By laying the groundwork for what we affectionately call “charming collaboration”, we hope to make Workflowy a powerful alternative to today’s bloated and clunky team organization software.
Next we have core Workflowy features. By that we mean taking the great single-user experience and extending it with more useful and powerful features (think dates, templates, calendar integration, etc.).
Our third track, growth, will be focused on making it easier for users of all types to discover and share the Workflowy experience with others. That means making it easier to share documents, and refer and invite others to enjoy Workflowy.
In addition, we would like to take this opportunity to present our shiny new product updates page. This page will make it easy to check what we’re up to at any given moment. You’ll be able to see links to our latest big releases, a roadmap of sorts that shows what we’re currently working on and what we plan to focus on next. And finally, you’ll be able to see the latest release notes.
We hope this page will make it easy to answer the age-old question of what are the folks at Workflowy doing instead of adding [insert your wish feature here]? Jokes aside, we do listen and take into consideration every feature request we receive. Over time we’ll refine the product updates page to reflect that reality and make it easier to see what other users have already requested.
For upcoming features, we’ll be using the blog and the Workflowy user group to ask the community for feedback. We want to start involving users earlier in the development process to make sure we’re working on the problems that users really need solved. That’s where you come in!
What’s Happening Now
As you’ll see on the product updates page, we’re currently busy working on two key features. Essentially change tracking and mentions.
Change tracking will allow anyone on the team to keep up with all the changes made across the entire shared item. That means you’ll be able to see what has changed, how it was changed, when and by who. No more asking if someone has updated “the thing”, you’ll be able to see that yourself. This makes asynchronous collaborative work in Workflowy much easier.
Mentions will allow you to get the attention of anyone on your team to either tell them something or assign an item to them. You’ll also be able to quickly view your own mentions and reply if desired. In addition, we’re hoping to provide notifications of your mentions so you don’t have to check Workflowy to see if you have a mention. Of course, this is something you’ll be able to turn off if you don’t want notifications of any kind.
It’s easy to say we’re doing these things. Designing them to work in a “Workflowy” way that makes sense and fits with the rest of the experience is what’s tricky. However, we’re confident that when we release the features, they’ll provide users that have been wanting to use Workflowy in a more formal team setting with the tools they need to be successful.
Here’s a top-secret sneak peek at what the features look like right now.
We don’t have a fixed release date for these and will instead release when we feel confident they’re ready and useful. But we’ll let you know in these updates how we’re feeling as time passes and the features take shape.
So there you have it, those are the two big things we’ve been working on and are continuing to develop. There are more things happening in the background and we’ll mention these over the coming weeks as they become relevant. For now, we hope this feature update has piqued your interest and shown you that new and exciting things are coming to Workflowy soon.
But that’s not all.
Internally we’ve taken a long hard look at how we do things at Workflowy, especially since growing the team. Going from 2 people to 14 means we need a new way to manage everything and make sure we’re using all our resources to give everyone the best Workflowy experience possible.
That means we’re also busy implementing a new way of working together that we believe will help turn us into a lean, mean, Workflowy-building machine. We’ve already started implementing this new method of working together and as time passes we will get better at it. We hope that the results will be evident to users as we get better at releasing features and overall making Workflowy a more useful and enjoyable experience.
What’s Next
Starting with these features, we plan to regularly publish updates on the blog, via social media and on our new product updates page as opposed to our standard way of sharing updates – cryptic crayon doodles delivered by carrier pigeon.
We’ll let you know when we’re close to releasing to beta, then to all users and so on. We’ll also mention any important updates or tweaks as they develop. We really want the community to feel like they’re along for the ride and can see and feel the progress and improvements as they happen.
On a much more serious note, we would also like to mention that several members of our team are based in Ukraine and have been facing the extremely difficult situation that’s currently ongoing in the country. Needless to say, current releases will slow down a bit until the situation is resolved and our team members and their families are out of harm’s way.
Sound off in the comments section if you have any thoughts, concerns or anything else you’d like to share.
Until the next update,
– The Workflowy team
Song referenced in the title 🎶
Thank you for this (and the product update page).
Finally I can learn what’s going on (and what’s not) all those times I get the little blue dot prompting me to restart and load a new version. I know most of those are not feature releases, but I’m reminded that I would like to know if there is anything new.
[…] to the upcoming “mentions” and “changes” features. As we mentioned in the last post, we’ll be running a closed test of the features before going to beta so we’re busy […]
The very basic function of Workflowy is to capture stuff so having a quick capture widget on our phone should be the top priority before getting any of the features discussed here.
The more we capture, the more we use it. The more we use it, then and only then, these other features become important.
To me the basic usage is to organize and think through thoughts.
Hey 5pic72, quick capture is definitely something we’ve discussed and are interested in exploring down the road.
Outstanding. Keep it up!
When will it be synced with Google Calendar?
Hey Combee, we don’t have a fixed timeframe for that. But you’ll be able to see on our product updates page once a feature idea like calendar syncing enters our brainstorming/development process.
I’m very happy to see an update, I agree with it getting a little too quiet. In contrast to many opinions here, I love the idea of having more team features. I love WF because I use the majority of it for solo use, but I love being able to use a small part of it to collaborate with my employees. It allows me to use one app to achieve everything. For the solo use, notifications would be the number one feature I’d use. I put dates but they go by without noticing, so I still use Google Calendar for that. Also, I would enjoy simple formulas, such as ‘today()’ that would change to the current day every day. That would make templates more powerful. For collaboration, notifications with the new mentions feature would be great. As of now we are just checking it randomly. We were about to make a ‘changelog’ bullet at the top to keep everyone updated. All in all I’m very happy to see the direction we’re headed and will be here for the ride. My only real question is the upload limits. I’m a paying member, so I see unlimited space with 5gb max file size. Does unlimited really mean unlimited? Say… 10 terabytes unlimited?
Hey Fred, thanks for the feedback!
With regards to upload limits – there’s currently no limit. We do exercise a fair use policy. That means that as long as you aren’t using uploading so much that it impacts our service or doing something like starting your own file hosting service you should be fine.
+1 for date notifications! I’ve been requesting this for ages 🙂
This is fantastic. Just read through it again. Thanks for sharing your trajectory and keeping us updated. I really appreciate it. Looking forward to seeing where you take us.
It seems like you’re pursuing the ol’ growth for the sake of growth strategy. Have you really never encountered the concept of feature creep in software? Shouldn’t people who feel the need for collaboration features use something else that is already better for that purpose (e.g. Notion)?
For me, what makes Workflowy better than the boatload of alternatives is its minimalism. The UI is snappy even on an 11 year old toaster. The newly added backlinks are foundational for associative note taking. I would focus on *that* use case instead, solidifying its already strong appeal as a research tool (by adding better formatting options and LaTeX) rather than misguidedly losing users in pursuit of more users.
Totally agree about this approach!
For LaTeX support, check out -> https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/439947-katexflowy
It works like a charm! 🙂
Hey, thanks for your feedback. As Jesse mentioned in another reply, it’s certainly not a case of growth for the sake of growth.
Rather, we want to be able to do more of those things you mention (like LaTeX support). To be able to do that well we basically need a bigger team. The more resources we have, the faster we’ll be able to develop and release those features we all want (we’re Workflowy users too!).
That’s great to hear. I (and some other users I guess) bailed from WorkFlowy to (in my case) Dynalist when development of Workflowy seemed to have permanently stalled. So I think it’s important to keep things moving and share the roadmap.
Now that I’m back on Workflowy, one of the great things about it is the elegant, clean user interface. I hope this is kept, and doesn’t become cluttered as team features are added.
On team features, I think this is a great idea although many users are used to using Workflowy as a stand-alone “secret weapon” and also, I guess, there are lots of freelancers out there nowadays who don’t need or want team features. I do believe there is a market for Workflowy as a team tool. *Everyone* understands how outlines and bullet lists work and you don’t have to buy into learning about Gaant charts, kanban, etc to be able to share an outline with someone else. Workflowy’s simplicity is it’s “super power”.
Thanks for the feedback Mark, we certainly aim to keep Workflowy as simple to use and elegantly minimal as we move forward.
Good evening,
Is a real iOS application possible?
Because for now it’s not very readable and comfortable to use… which made me migrate to Craft… for now…
Hey Aze, developing a native iOS app is no simple feat so i don’t think that’s in our plans for the near future. That being said, there’s definitely more work we can do to improve the experience of our current mobile app on iOS and I think that’s where we’ll focus for now.
Honestly, I don’t see my team migrating to WorkFlowy for collaboration work because we are already happy using powerful tools special designed for that matter. And those softwares are so rich in features for collaboration and Project Management that migrating to WorkFlowy for that would be a backwards step due to its smaller scope and fewer features.
Having said, that. almost everybody in our team uses WorkFlowy to manage their own personal tasks. We have always seen WorkFlowy as the perfect tool for single user, personal task management rather than a collaborative tool.
Saying this, so you don’t lose the focus on the real power you have already achieved. I know there are hundreds of tools now in the market for collaborative work, many of them are excellent. For personal use, on the other hand WorkFlowy is still the best tool in existence for single user management. Hope you don’t lose that privilege in the pursue of another market that is already happy with other tools specially designer for that pursuit.
No comparto la preocupación por los años de vigencia sana de Workflowy, a quienes les creo que no van a dejar de lado a los usuarios individuales.
En lo que se refiere a la colaboración, la espero con ansías, porque si bien existen muchas herramientas de trabajo colaborativo, muchas de ellas caen en tal cantidad de funciones y diseño que no son armónicas con las ideas de simplicidad, flexibilidad y enfoque, aspectos que Workflowy en lo personal tiene una ventaja importante.
Hey Perf, thanks for the feedback. As you mentioned in your post, there are already a bunch of collaboration tools out there, and many are highly specialized.
Our goal is not to try and compete against these custom solutions. In the same way that Workflowy only does a few things but does them really well – we want our collaboration features to be few but great so that teams of all types and sizes can easily pick it up and get started using it for the majority of their collaboration needs. It definitely won’t do everything, but the things it will do will be excellent, and we’re betting for most teams, that’ll be better than a more feature heavy option that lacks the flexibility and speed of Workflowy.
Would you mind sharing what software do you use for project & collaboration tasks?
Hola
En lo personal me parece fantástico las noticias de Workflowy, porque me permitirá trabajar en tareas pendientes y proyectos de mejor forma con mi equipo.
También me quedó claro que las mejoras en equipos, en caso alguno importa abandona al usuario individual.
Ahora bien, una cuestión de fondo que me permito señalar con respeto y aprecio a todos:
Un abrazo y gracias al equipo de Workflowy
Saludos Carlos, gracias por tus comentarios!
¡Qué bueno! También faltó agregar en el changelog que ahora en WorkFlowy también hablamos en Español! 😀
The team features aren’t personally valuable to me at the moment; but I’ve been so impressed with everything else workflowy has integrated that I’m eager to see how they turn out. (Definitely have used numerous apps for team management that I felt ‘missed the mark’.)
Love the additional transparency and hoping for the best for your team. I had no idea you were up to 14 people, that’s great!
Hey Joseph, thanks for the kind words. We’ve tried to use a lot of team management software and run into the same issues. We plan to bring that same Workflowy magic that single users love to entire teams – and with the community’s feedback and support we’re confident we’ll achieve it.
I’m sorry to say I find the screenshots extremely confusing. At first glance I don’t understand to which lines the “comment” and “added” tags are assigned. The contents of the page do not help understanding.
Hey Vincent, in both cases the lines that are highlighted are the ones that either have the comment or have the change. Then the text above it indicates who made the mention or what the change was.
Please can you focus more on the single user experience as a priority, rather than teams? I’m sure this will be useful in the future, and that you will find a way to keep it from being bloated like other apps out there, but so many of us are using it to help organise our lives. As others have mentioned, there have been some features that have been requested for years (Reminders!), even though we all know that they can’t be created with a wave of a magic wand.
For me personally I would really like:
Thanks for listening to your community and thanks for keeping us updated.
Hey S C, thanks for your comments. The idea is work on both core features and collaboration features in parallel, not just on collaboration ones. Also, teams will need a lot of the features that users have requested for quite some time so in the end they will get added.
Having a great single-user experience will always be our number one priority, that’s not changing. We’re simply improving the experience for users that are already using Workflowy in teams but don’t have the basic collaboration tools they need.
I want to explain why we are doing this.
First, we need it, and lots of users need it. We need to be able to use Workflowy collaboratively for our own use, and it just doesn’t work well enough. Lots of our users share stuff in Workflowy, so we are trying to bring the basics to ourselves and these users.
Second, it will speed up core features by letting us hire more people. We need to hire more people to really increase our momentum on the core product (including the features you have requested). Teams are the best way to make more money, which will enable this.
So, it all comes back to making the core product amazing and solving real needs of users. We understand it is frustrating when you aren’t part of the users an effort is serving, but as Rodolfo pointed out, we aren’t abandoning the single user experience in any way.
I think this precise and concise entry clarifies everything.
It’s the perfect approach to keep the ship sailing, accomplishing all goals.
Beautiful product, guys! How I love minimalism in a cluttered world!
Keep going!!!
Thank you Rodolfo and Jesse for explaining the thinking behind your decisions. It does help to know that us single users are not being left behind and it also helps to know that the features that will benefit teams (and especially your team) will overall benefit all of us users. Thanks again for making that clear 🙂
For me, team features is way down the list of what I need out of Workflowy. Way down. Sharing, as it is now, works just fine. There are TONS of tools that allow collaboration. Stick to what is working best for you — the core features.
What I’d like to see most is split panels allowing drag-and-drop, sorting, extended properties such as creation/completion dates, support for simple tables, a better mobile experience.
I beg of you, please don’t spend resources and time on team features — leave that to the other tools that have it already implemented.
Hey J Serio, we hear you. A great single user experience will always be our number one priority.
However, we also have a lot of users that already use Workflowy to manage teams and organizations that are missing really basic collaboration features. For those users, this is not a matter of adding additional features but basic ones they need for Workflowy to be functional.
This is not an announcement that we’re changing our focus away from single users to teams, rather that we’re adding a new track to our priorities. We’ll continue to work on core features in parallel like the ones you mentioned. Also please keep in mind that as Workflowy becomes functional for teams, those teams will have very similar needs to what you’ve mentioned (split panels, sorting, better date support, etc.), so those features will start showing up on our product updates page.
Hope focus on ‘core features’ instead of team features. For example, split right panel. And select texts then input [[, it should create a link to the selected text not just replace these texts with [[.
Dont know why you decided to put effort on team features, this is not Workflowy’s strong point.
Hi Seraphs, thanks for the feedback. Believe us, we’re aware it’s currently not our strong point! However, we have a lot of users that already use Workflowy in a teams settings that are missing very basic features like these.
For those users, these additions will give them the basic tools they need to switch their teams to Workflowy and bring more users to the community. Collaboration features will bring more users but core features are what will keep them using Workflowy so rest assured we’ll be working on these in parallel.
Word count?
These seem like cool features. With that said, I wish you’d address a couple of things that have been hanging for a long time now.
1. Please give us date/time of creation and date/time completion on each bullet item.
2. Also, are reminder notifications on bullets really so complicated to implement? It seems like people have been requesting this feature for as long as I’ve been using Workflowy, which is getting up on 10 years now.
I agree there still needs to be focus on ‘core business’. URL handling is shocking and needs to be improved – I’ve been asking for years to be able to disable or turn it off
I totally agree with your comment. I need reminder notification. And If I have it, I can escape from other to-do list application.
Interestingly, the work we’ve done on collaboration has pushed both of these forward significantly. The first one will be done asap, and the infrastructure for reminders has been put in place.
I’d assume 1. is covered within “Change tracking”?
All good product news, though I’m sorry to hear some of the team are in harm’s way. If there’s anything we as a community can do to help them, please tell us.
On the upcoming features I only have one suggestion – I’m dealing with two levels of colleague: one is ‘collaborator’ someone able to make changes and contribute to developments; and the other is ‘audience’ – someone viewing a knowledge base for educational or informational purposes. Collabs will be technically proficient, able to use WF to the full. Audiences will include WF agnostics whose major (only?) skill will be in following links. Please allow for a ‘publish’ sort of mode where owners can set all the parameters for a database, like colours / fonts / tags and where a non-tech user can simply use a ‘view’ access to get around.
(Hope that makes sense… 🙂 )
Hi Stuart!
One of the things on our “Considering” list on the Updates page is:
Basic publishing: Turn your Workflowy content into an online document or mini blog.
I’m thinking along the lines of “postach.io” which I know you must know about 😉
Also, are you aware of the view only share mode?