We’ve made some dramatic improvements in how we handle dates in Workflowy. This makes Workflowy a much better home for all your tasks – from tracking your individual work activities to managing an entire team’s projects. You can now effortlessly tag items using your preferred date format, set date ranges, quickly and visually adjust dates, and much more. We believe these upgrades drastically improve how Workflowy handles dates in general and provides a much smoother experience when used for task management and tracking.
So whether you’ve used date tags in the past or not, this upgrade makes it super easy to get started tagging items and make use of date tags in combination with searches to turn Workflowy into your main task management hub.
This bundle of date upgrades also lays the foundation for some really useful upcoming features, in particular those that will further improve how we handle tasks in Workflowy. We’ll have more to say about this in an upcoming update so without further ado, let’s get right into what’s new and improved.
Date picker
We’ve added a comprehensive date picker that makes it super easy to set a date. We added some common options like “tomorrow” and “next week” to help new users discover and explore our natural language input. Next, we added a calendar widget that takes the guesswork out of setting a date, especially when it comes to dates far into the future. And finally, we added a range option that lets you create date tags that cover a range of dates.
‘!!’ date input shortcut
A new date picker’s great but we need an easy way to access it. The ‘!!’ shortcut lets us do just that. Just type the exclamation sign on an empty item or after an empty space if there’s already text to display the date picker. You can then click the date you want or start typing a natural language date like “in three weeks” and the calendar widget will update to show the appropriate date.
Custom date format
International users with sensible date formats rejoice. You can now choose from the most common date formats and even modify them if they’re not quite to your liking. You can also change the time format from 12 hours to 24 hours. Whenever you change the date or time formats, any date tags you already have will automatically update to reflect the change.
Exploding dates
Sometimes you really just need to quickly remove a date tag with some satisfying flair. Now you can, by holding the Alt key on Windows or CMD key on Mac and clicking the date tag to send it to the shadow realm. That’s it, that’s the feature, but man is it satisfying.
Range support in date tags
Previously, you could search for date ranges but there was no way to tag an item with one. Now you can, either from the date picker by toggling “range” and picking a start and end date or by simply adding a dash “-” between two dates when typing them directly in Workflowy.
Add date slash command
For those that prefer to use the slash command for everything, we also have a new command to display the date picker. Using the “/date” command will let you set a date.
New date format – pill
Along with the technical upgrades, we’ve also decided to update the appearance of date tags to help them stand out and to make it clear you can click to modify them. Clicking these new tags will display the date picker where you can set a new date or remove the tag altogether.
Click a date to change it
You can now easily modify any date tag just by clicking it. Doing so will display the new date picker which you can then use to choose another date.
Just write “today”, “tomorrow” or anything else to add a date
You can use all kinds of natural language inputs to easily create date tags. Everything from “tomorrow“, “next thursday“, “oct 7” or even “in three days” will prompt a date suggestion that you can confirm and turn into a date tag. This is one of the quickest ways to create a date tag.
Changes we made based on your feedback 🫶
Thanks to everyone that shared their thoughts with us in the comments section while the update was in labs. Your feedback was invaluable and gave us a list of things we should keep in mind as we move forward with features that build on dates. Below are some of the specific pieces of feedback we’ve addressed before releasing the dates improvements to all our users.
Changes
- Alex, Luke
“DD.MM.YYYY should be a default date format option”
Added DD.MM.YYYY and YYYY-MM-DD as a default options in date formats picker
- Julie Hammers, Mark Simpson
“Complete dates should have strikethroughs”
Strikethroughs also apply to new date tags
- Matthieu, alienlebarge, Julien, Remko
“The keyboard shortcut is interfering with the French use of exclamation points”
Changed keyboard shortcut from ! to !!
Bugs fixed
- Arthur Zey, olaf, Otto, others
Formatting bug that caused date tags to display errors when a user set their own custom date format.
- Mark Simpson, Vaughn, others
Date picker used incorrect styling in certain Workflowy themes, causing parts of the interface to appear hidden.
- Christopher Allen, Mike McGee, 8080, others
Custom date formats were polluting the date format dropdown each time an edit was made.
Until the next one, peace out.
But no TIME? I need to know the time of things to be able to track them properly! This has now become just a nuisance! ☹️
Am I missing something? What about international date format of D\M\Y? Is that still not recognised?
Nice set of updates team! Any chance repeating dates are in the future?
Hey, right now we aren’t working on recurring dates, but we are testing Zapier integration, which can solve some of the recurring dates / tasks use cases if you are OK to get a bit techy.
Another major upgrade I would suggest is the ability to parse math equations on the fly and provide answers. If I type in “5*3=” it would be wonderful if the answer was auto populated with 15. Just an idea!
Hey, not sure if that’s what you mean, but the slash command actually supports simple math equations, so you can do “/3*5” > Enter and it will insert “15”.
Would you add Tab support for the date picker?
Here is an example scenario:
I’m editing a line.
I press ‘!!’+Tab.
Today’s date is printed in.
Thanks for the quick bug fixes! The strikethrough definitely looks much better. Now, about that keyboard shortcut to edit existing dates… what used to be editable text is now a pill that can only be deleted. not kidding, this is killing my productivity. 😭
Agreed. It would be great to have a keystroke to access/edit a date field without having to reach for the mouse. When in the date pop-up it would also be nice to have the existing date selected so one could just “type over” a new date, rather than deleting the existing date.
I really love the date search options, but I do not see one to show me all line items with date tags. I can get all “past” items or all “future” items (and any with both past and future dates) – but not both together or “date:all”. Am I missing it?
Is there anyway this I can make a date trigger me / give me a notification?
Tremendous. So tempting. I have paid for workflowy every year for at least a decade and the only reason I hesitate to commit to workflowy as my “one trusted source” is because I haven’t been able to find a way to safely back up Photos and files attached to notes. I wish the brilliant folks at workflowy would come up with a workaround and publish it because I believe it would convert many lovers of the product from standby to fully on board.
I didn’t get the update, and on the previous rollout too. Is it a staggered rollout? Or regional?
Are you using the desktop app? If so, you have to manually re-install by clicking the little blue dot at the top right of the app. We should probably have a popup like other apps have started doing in the past few years. This used to be the standard.
If you don’t use the desktop app, please give more details about how you’re doing it
I’d love a kanban display of items with dates where you can scroll left-right to have a timeline of todo’s, so you can see what’s ahead and see what’s left. Would work wonderful in combination with the Show Complete/Hide Complete function.
So items without a date attached would NOT get on the kanban style board.
Yeah, this is a very cool idea.
just amazing THANKS!
Love the update
Aweosme! Prevoiusly I did not use dates in Workflowy because they didn’t fit my way of doing things. Now I started to use them regularly.
I hope this excellent app add something like “fix”, so I never delete or change anything important accidentally.
Such a great and super cool feature
I would LOVE the date format “MM/DD d” as in “11/28 T”. I learned this when choosing classes in college. MTWRFSN for the week. where It uses R=Thursday and N=Sunday. The remaining days are normal M=Mon, T=Tues etc.
or maybe “ddd, MM/DD” for “Sat, 12/23”, it’s longer, but maybe more people would use it.
Agree. I would like to have the option to abbreviate the days with just one upper case letter. This currently works:
2023.12.31 (Sun)
But this would be more compact: 2023.12.31 (N) and this even more compact: 2023.12.31 N
I use Workflowy as a outlining tool. I use it to prepare for a presentation, to collect research, to outline a storyline for my writings. It’s the best tool I have found.
I used to use Scrivener to write a book, but found it heavy, overly complex, and not efficient for outlining which is the most important for writing. I now use Workflowy and MS Word for my current book writing.
I hope Workflowy to develop into this direction. If you would develop Workflowy for task management, maybe allow the basic Workflowy to become a base-layer on which developers could build more outliner features. Of course you could make different versions or templates yourself. Anyway, I hope Workflowy does not become less useful for outlining.
Love the updates and the changes, maybe think of adding a column to the left which say the week we are relative to the year, e.g. this year’s week is the 48th
Super, thanks!
It would be useful to have another format setting to define the first day of the week for the date picker. In Europe it is very weird to have Sunday as the first day of the week and this can easily lead to mistakes in the selection.
In addition, it would be useful to have a feature to date weeks or days or months consecutively. I mean, making it easy to have an entry that is a week/day/month/year template that one can duplicate and easily tag with the relevant week without having to every time search for the dates (probably one should have to do the search for the dates the first time, and then be able to continue the series automatically).
E.g.
Week template -> Week 27.11.23 – 3.12.23
Week template -> Week 4.12.23 – 10.12.23
Yes, we have looked hard at this. Unfortunately the natural language parser we use doesn’t support this :/ So, we’ll have to figure it out, but couldn’t fit it in this version. Sorry it didn’t get in there, we know it is important to most of the world.
I don’t have the pill format. Do you need to enable it?
Thank you so much for your work !
Would it be possible to have YYYY.MM.DD as a default options in date formats picker as well? That would be fantastic
This is great.
Could we also have reminders as well?
You could make them work similar to Notion.
For example:
I create a date stamp.The date option modal has a checkbox for “remind me on this date” or “x minutes/days/hours before this date“If that date has passed, that date turns 🔴 red and can be found in a “Overdue” flag, hashtag, page, or search queryBONUS: ‘Overdue’ lives in the sidebar with a number badge next to it.BONUS: Overdue sends a push notification to email/mobile
Along the same line, having a relative date for the search would be great, such as “date-before:[today]”, which I could then “star”. I can do “date-before:11/28/23” currently to achieve that, but would need to change it everyday since it isn’t relative.
When I started asking for reminders, Obama was president (might have even been his first term). Hopefully, this is an important step towards that goal.
THANK YOU!!! I was dating things before you added dates, and so was overwhelmed with joy when you first introduced dates as a feature.
Thought it couldn’t get any better. But I hated the long look of it, so when I saw the pill format pop up… again, rejoicing. Like you guys are reading my mind.
I was also already doing date ranges, so AGAIN, thrilled to see the day the app seemed to finally understand my ranges. Thought you couldn’t get ANY better…
… and THEN you give me EXPLODING DATES just for fun, just for the heck of it, just as a ‘why not?’
This is why I love this app and your team and my fellow users. You marry functional to FUN.
Thanks a million, y’all. My whole career owes you.
XOXO, Kiddo
YES! I used to find the date suggestions annoying (whereas I use them constantly in Jira) I think mostly because I hated the format.
One more suggestion – select ‘Today’ by default after hitting
!!, so you can use!! ENTERto get today (akin to// ENTERin Jira).Or maybe I just need to adapt and get used to
today TAB, which is an elegant and logical option.The Workflowy stoke is strong!
just start writing today anywhere and it will automatically ask to turn it to a date…
Good job on refining that feature !!
Do you support the ability to convert all existing dates in Workflowy nodes, e.g. 28/11/23 to their equivalent new format, i.e. a clever search and replace?
By the way, I absolutely love Workflowy and it’s improving daily! Keep up the great work
You should add a date command that keeps changing with the current date. A clock too or countdowns for task completion.
Love it
Great new enhancements!
The next one I’d suggest is integrating Workflowy nodes with Google Tasks so they can appear on the Google Calendar. There is a Chrome Store extension, Workflowy to Google Calendar, that creates links as calendar events, but I prefer Tasks because you can mark them complete, and they will “follow” you on the calendar as pending tasks until you finish or reschedule them.