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.
how cool! in the settings i can set my preferred format to #\d-Y-M-DD
so
todaybecomes#d-2023-11-28It’s a minor thing, but on Chrome OS the exploding dates don’t seem to work. (I’m trying both the Windows and the Mac shortkeys.)
Fun features for the sake of having a fun feature is something we’ve lost. Thank you for the exploding dates!
Thank you for the update!
But I still can’t coloring these new dates, I used to highlight my current day and week with some color, I hope you’ll bring it back.
These are terrific updates to Workflowy. Here’s a suggestion that people might find useful. I set the default format to “#YEAR-MO-DAY”. That automatically turns the date into a hyperlink, which I find very helpful in finding related events, contemporaneous articles, etc.
[…] Arthur Zey, olaf, Otto, others사용자가 자신의 사용자 정의 날짜 형식을 설정할 때 날짜 태그에 오류가 표시되는 형식 오류입니다. […]
[…] Arthur Zey, olaf, Otto, others ユーザー独自の日付書式を設定した際、日付タグがエラーになるバグ。 […]
Thanks to the team for making the new date feature, the semantic conversion is great.
But it brings up a few issues.
1. I can no longer simply type 2023-11 in the search box to find all items for a particular month, but now have to put it in quotes like “2023-11”.
2. in the search box, the typing format and the date pill format don’t match, and again, it’s not possible to search for a particular month.
3. Previously, plain text dates were used as item nodes, and dates could be linked or mirrored, which could be used in daily workflows, the new date pill acts more like a node attribute.
I think, when the search function for the date pill to improve, and then change the old habits of use, should be able to solve the above three problems.
Maybe more features of the date pill could be implemented like tabs. Like a floating menu (computer) or long press (mobile).
Hey team.
First of all, congrats for the update!
A question and a note about a bug that’s previously been reported.
One of the “novelties” of the blog post is the date range, but wasn’t it possible before this update? Is there any real news about it I’m missing?
And about the bug, I’ve tried to configure the dates to a custom set (DDDD/MM/DD (ddd)). Weirdly enough for me, some of the dates are properly formated (2023/11/20 (Mon), for example), while others not (un22fin22…).
Fortunately, the dates are not missing, and if I revert the format they’re all properly formatted, but it’s strange this different formatting for the preexisting dates…
appreciate the update. i guess we are pretty close to REMINDERS!!
P.S. Does anybody have a template for 2024-2025 calendar? i guess i might be a good idea to have build in the wf itself ( other super basic templates are ok too)
january
can we also add time to the to new pop up window? seems to be working with dates only. still have to add times manually.
Like this ? https://workflowy.com/s/2024/wQN2hAUPJ85WigXa
yes, perfect. thanks!
Really cool, thanks a lot!
One question, how will the date range work with the search? Can i look for start date before/after, end date before/after, or anything that is in progress (i.e. in between range start and end)?
And there’s one small bug I found: if you select a range with the date picker, and pick an end date in the far future (e.g. May 2024), it will insert a strange finishing date: “2023-11-06 (Mo) – un44fin44”.
Thank you so much again, Christoph
PS: i love the date explosion!
Great new feature! Any chance to show weekdays/months in other languages (German in my case)?
Possible bug? When I type 1:00am <tab>, I get 1:00am on Sun, Nov 19, 2023… but if I type 12:00am <tab>, I get Sun, Nov 19, 2023 without the time. All other times seem to work as expected except for the hour after midnight. Any ideas?
updates and flexibility/options appreciated, thanks. Helps automate the daily journal entries.
Very cool!
Is it planned to combine the amazing power of nested search with the dates function? That would be really powerful I imagine
Hello team, Just a quick note to say that I realy appreciate all this work around dates. Very convenient!
I wanted however to raise on problem… I am a French user and in French typo, you have a space before the exclamation mark. With the new system, anytime I want to use an exclamation mark, i have the date input shortcut instead of the exclamation mark I want. Anyworkaround?
Hi, this is fixed.
Date handling and display is really great now. The date pill looks fantastic and helps with the overall visual aspect of separating the text display of the date from the text of the task. Thanks for this really helpful change! If I could have one addition to this, I would like the ability to change the color of the date pill from gray to a different color.
I’d appreciate a (global) customization like this too.
Can you convert existing dates into the new date format? e.g. the string 2023-11-17 into the new date format?
When entering “((nov 21” to mirror an existing item with this date, the date popup now overlaps the mirror popup, making it impossible to see what item will be mirrored when pressing enter. I guess the date popup should not be shown here while searching for an item to mirror.
I use this feature quite often to mirror my daily notes into my boards view.
This is how it looks like
Hi. Is there by any chance a way to set the current date to a node when creating it using a template button?
the most important but still missing feature as for dates is an active alarm / reminder for the due dates
ISO 8601
Thank you for these great news!
I’m a little confused with the functionality of the “!”, because in French, we actually put a space before the “!” character. So, now it is no longer possible to do so.
Same here, had to turn the date improvement off.
Came here to say that, this is rather confusing at first.
I have the same problem !
We’re fixing
It is fixed now, we need two ! to trigger the date picker, thanks !!!
I’m a little puzzled about why setting the date format to “YYYY-MM-DD” produces little date pills, but setting it to “#YYYY-MM-DD” does not.
I use the latter for compatibility with Complice, and it’s probably actually a good thing that the hash-marked dates don’t get pilled because I suspect it would break the Complice integration, but it’s a curious inconsistency.
Also: why is “YYYY-MM-DD” not one of the standard date formats offered in the dropdown initially?
And why, having set it manually, is the date formats dropdown now polluted with a whole bunch of formats that don’t look look like ones any normal person would choose?:
I would like to suggest some refinements to make it even better (already is excellent)
Wanted to suggest exactly the same thing ! Thanks. Hope it’ll get added.
When are developers finally gonna learn that half is the world has the week starting on MONDAY, not Sunday? :d
this is cool, but what about the sidebar?
Searching for parts of the date worked for text (eg „15/11“) but not for dates now (only full legth „15/11/2023“ works)
Click Date to change does not work (yet) on iPad w/ smart keyboard / touch pad…
Otherwise: GREAT WORK!
This is so awesome!
I’m very happy with this update. Waited “a little while” for non US date formats :-), but hey …. it’s very good now. Thank you! Very much appreciated!
Great news! Although I’m always a little worried about getting too far from “plain text simplicity”.
Suggestion: Can we have proper, zero-padded YYYY-MM-DD date formats, like 2024-01-02? Right now, it seems like “YYYY-MM-DD” will get you “2024-01-Th”, and “YYYY-MM-D” will give you “2024-01-2”.
Also, I’m getting a lot of “undefined” errors like the one below, hopefully they will be sorted out as you push bugfixes the next couple of days.👍
Thanks for all the great work you guys are doing on what is definitely one of my favorite tools of all time!
The reminder (notification) is the next step !
Fantastic update
If you add a calendar view, any sort of, I think I will migrate completely and forget about other planning software, now I use Workflowy and Google Cal only, that’s fully enough
That is marvelous guys, really happy about it. But how can I use time? It’s not settable for now.. Or I don’t see
These appeared out of nowhere and clogged the date style picking menu… while trying to create my custom style :/
Such a simple feature… so many bugs… To (use) date or not to (use) date – this is the 1 mil $ question…
This is awesome! Main reason I was considering finally migrating away is actually dates! I’d like to use the semantic side, but for god’s sake miss me with the “Thu 14, Whatever US Style poorly sortable” format. I need my YYYY-MM-DD.
Please consider making the date-time format customizable. “10:00 on DATE” is bad for the same main reason – sorting. Need an option with time after the date.
Also: slash commands for now / today would be awesome. Especially now as it doesn’t exist as an option anywhere in the UI AFAIK.
Hey Alex, does typing “now” or “today” not trigger the date helper widget for you? Or did you have something else in mind with a slash command for these?
They do work now! Maybe needed to refresh.
Wow, just great Guyz, thx !
Super!
Unfortunately, my language is not in the “natural language”. As an option, it would be nice to make it customizable.
Fantastic – as a European I can now finally enjoyu dates in DD.MM.YYYY format. Just suggest that you also add that to the standard list of formats available right out of the box – at the moment you have only DD/MM/YYYY used in the U.K., but not in continental Europe..
fantastic! but i just love the old #d-2022-11-16 format frank suggested 😀
Great new feature! Good job!
We’ve been waiting for this for years. The dates in the previous format were so unreadable to me. I will finally have dates in the DD-MM-YYYY or YYYY-MM-DD format. And that’s great. Thank you.
I’m a bit perplexed about the use of the exclamation point as a shortcut. In French, the exclamation point is preceded by a space, which causes the date picker to be displayed every time we want to write an exclamatory sentence. I encountered this problem after just 5 minutes of use.
Marvelous! I always thought that this is the feature that has been missing in Workflowy to uplift it in task management. Now I can convince more of my friends to join.
Keep it up as I’m sure there are many new features that will build on this
This is fantastic. I’d played around with the dates feature a bit previously, but wound up sticking with my old way of dating my to-dos with tags. (I use tags for year, month, firstweek/secondweek/etc., and day.) But the ease and speed of updating dates in this new system is enough to make me switch over, because when have I ever actually completed my to-do list for a day? (or week. or month.)
Is there a way to search for all items that have a date, regardless of what that date is? Or all items that don’t have a date? I played around with the search for a while but couldn’t figure it out.
Hey Nicki, there’s currently no search operator for just dates, but you could use a search like “01/01/1999 – 01/01/2024” to get all date tags.
Hi Rodolfo, Is it planned ?
I would really love to be able to search for things without a date too! When I have a list of tasks, some of them with due dates, some of them that can be done whenever, I currently can’t say “give me everything overdue, everything due today and everything without a date”. The first two I can do with “date:past OR date:today” but I can’t do the last as well AFAIK.
I think there is a bug there, mind to take a look?
Hey lokheart, we’re investigating the issue it seems to be related to modifying the date format presets. If you switch to a default one your dates should display correctly while we deploy a fix.
very great job! Now task alert with notification on mobile App is the last feature I am longing for.
This is a fantastic update, I was pleasantly surprised to see my dates suddenly turning into pills this morning. I’ve got some initial feedback on them for you.
Like others have mentioned the font size is too small. Ideally this would be configurable or at least the same size as the text. I can see the pill padding fits within the regular text height but the hashtag pills have regular text size and still work. Even increasing the font size from 0.80em to 0.85em seems better.
And like the hashtag pills being able to customise the date pill colour would be great.
A completed date should also have a proper strikethrough. If you have items in a list which are just the date and they’re completed, they look grey but they don’t look complete. This looks like a bug, completed hash tag pills have the strikethrough.
There seems to be no way to edit an existing date with the keyboard. Previously I could just edit the text directly, now it’s a pill and my options seem to be delete it or nothing. I mostly use the keyboard with Workflowy and it’s bad enough that the colour selection is still not available without a mouse but at least that was a new feature. You’re actually removing keyboard functionality in this case. I even tried selecting it and using the “!” shortcut that just replaced the date with “!” 🤦♂️
Also it may be that I’m the only one using the Vintage theme but if you are the date popup doesn’t show the dates for the current month because the font colour is the same as the background colour. This seems to be case for all themes where the popup background is dark.
Like I said a great update but if I could trade the exploding date text for any of the actual functionality I’ve mentioned here… well, you get the picture 😁
It’s the feature I’ve requested!
This is great, one suggestion, can we get “date-after:today” “date-after:this month” or “next month”or something
I want a favourite search filter that allows me too look at all current tags (like today), future tags, or past.