I’m happy to announce the first step toward date support in WorkFlowy. Today, we’re releasing the ability to quickly add dates to WorkFlowy, and to search for them. This lets people easily and quickly do the most basic date related functionality, and sets the foundation for the things we’ll be working on next, like reminders, snoozing, sorting, recurring and more.
1. How turn on dates
Dates in WorkFlowy is still in an experimental feature, and we’d love your feedback on it. To try it out, just go to settings and turn on two features: “Dates” and “Search Helper”. If you’re using an app, like the desktop app or a mobile app, you may need to a) install the new version of the app and 2) log out and back in again, before you see the new options in your settings.
2. How to add dates
WorkFlowy is a text-first interface, and we wanted dates to let you work similarly. Thus, we’ve made it so that all you need to do to add a date to WorkFlowy, is type it.
You can type a normal date like “Dec 25, 2019” (or lots of other formats)* and it’ll recognize it, and you can add times. Or (and this is what I’m personally using much more), you can use shortcuts like, “now”, “today”, “tomorrow”, “next week”, “last week”, “two months from now” etc. and it’ll prompt you to confirm that you want to turn this into a date (you can just ignore and keep typing if you don’t want a date).
Combined with a similarly smart and simple search support, dates in WorkFlowy become pretty powerful.
3. How to search for dates
Our new search helper should help you You can search for a day, a month, a year, or a date range, and it will recognize it. It will also recognize the searches “This
4. Date ranges
We support ranges of dates both in content and in search. This is helpful in a lot of contexts, like research and project planning.
5. Mobile support
It works on mobile, too, but the interface is a little different.
6. What’s this useful for?
Here are the primary use cases we thought about when designing this feature:
- Adding future dates to tasks and projects, then finding nodes relevant to executing and planning
- Quickly adding the current date when journaling or taking live notes
- Doing research that includes dates and complex timelines (to better support this use case, we’re thinking about adding the ability to search for dates in any text you’ve pasted in, even those you don’t explicitly make into dates. Please let us know if this is important to you).
7. To-do
We have a team member dedicated to building out dates. After ironing out issues with basic entry and search, the next features we plan to focus on are snoozing and reminders, but please let us know what your priorities are so we can factor them in.
- Reminders for dates you’ve set pushed to your phone and email
- Recurring dates
- Snoozing items until a certain date
- Sort by date (and other things)
- Do stuff when you click on a date (give you choices to search for related dates and turn on the features like reminders and zooning)
- Ways to add dates with a mouse
- Calendar sync?
8. Send us your feedback!
We’re releasing this as an experimental feature, we know this is a somewhat different implementation of dates than most tools (more typing, less clicking). There’s still a lot to do (reminders for example), but we’d really love to hear your thoughts. After you try it, leave your feedback either in: 1) comments on this post or 2) an email to help@workflowy.com.
* Note: We’re using a month/day/year format by default, and haven’t added day/month/year used in much of the world. We’re sorry, we wanted to add this but it added a bunch of complexity we weren’t ready to take on yet. If you aren’t in the US, we recommend using a year/month/day format, and we hope to be able to let people choose their own format sometime soon.
+1 for Google Calendar synch and entering ISO (20200124).
The goal is to just bring up the phone, jot down a note and enter a date & time and then be reminded about it at a time in the future…
Thank you so much! This is something I’ve wanted for a long time.
Two further requests 🙂
1. I already have many dates in my document, and I’d like to be able to automatically convert them to the new date object.
2. It would be great to be able to customize the formatting of dates to e.g. 2020-01-22.
Thanks again!
Hi @wmayner,
Custom date formatting is being built as we speak! Thank you for adding to the conversation 🙂
Hi Frank! How is this coming along?
Awesome feature, thanks!
Jesse, here’s what appears to me to be an error in this new software mod, and I don’t know if others have mentioned it or not. I previously used another personal method to note dates in my Workflowy file. To find my desired dates, I would just use the Search function. And to me the easiest way to replace my prior dating method with this new format for dates, is to use the ‘Find/Replace’ bookmarklet.
But when I enter my previous date in the annotation and try to replace it with the Workflowy ‘Find/Replace’ bookmarklet by manually entering your new date format then clicking on ‘Find/Replace’, Workflowy’s search feature doesn’t find my new dates, even though they are entered identically to this new format.
In other words, it appears this new dating format isn’t working correctly with the ‘Find/Replace’ feature. I suspect (not certain) that might be because the ‘Find/Replace’ feature was an add-on created by someone else (perhaps Rawbytz? Not sure).
Am I correct in that? Has anyone else seen that?.
I have seen that, especially when I try to search at anything other than the Home level. I have trained myself in the Chrome browser to hit the ESC key twice before searching for anything.
My own date mechanism is #2020Jan17. I have found that inserting slashes or dashes (e.g. #2020/01/17 or #2020-01-17) did have some problems. What is your date scheme?
Jeffrrey, The date scheme I have been using is Jan – 17.
@Earl Find/Replace is mine, and it does not support the new date format. It can be modified to support date finding, but that will be worthless because the current WorkFlowy API doesn’t support writing dates, so no replacing of dates is possible. Until the API function is updated, there is nothing I can do.
Rawbytz, thanks for that info, greatly appreciated. And kudos to you also, for all the work you’ve done as well.
And (I’m sure for the same reason) the ‘Sort WF’ bookmarklet isn’t compatible for chronological sorting, using this new date structure either. But not a big deal.
And (to all) my ‘complaint’ above isn’t a show-stopper at all. Even though I think I’ll retain my current dating system in Workflowy until I can experiment with this some more, Workflowy is still terrific. I have used Workflowy for everything for a couple years now – notes, jounalling, tasks, appointments, everything.
And as I mention in another post, I think the terms ‘Now’ and ‘Today’ used as a time stamp and a date stamp, could benefit almost any Workflowy user, regardless of how they use the software. I’ll definitely use those features.
I’m one of those users who bought the PRO feature not because I really need it, but just because I want to help all you guys continue your great work.
Thanks again –
@Earl, I’ve done a little more investigating… I figured out how to write to existing dates, and update them. I still can’t create new dates. At this point, I probably won’t update Find/Replace until the dates feature is more dialed in, and out of the “experimental” phase. I know what needs to be done… and it’s quite a bit 🙂
In the interim, I may create a date-specific find/replacer…. this will be added to PowerPack, my paid add-on to the WFx extension. fwiw, PowerPack already has 2 new date related scripts:
1) Sort By Date – sorts dated items to the top, new to old, or old to new.
2) Format Date – converts WorkFlowy’s default date format to one of your choosing.
Reminders are not needed. But YES on Calander Sync please
Sweet!
I have only played a bit with this, but it definitely meets 70%+ of my date-related needs. I am very psyched about this. My main feature request would be email summaries of lines tagged with particular dates.
I think that the date-entry mode of asking if you want to accept the date interpretation works well.
The semantics of searching are potentially more confusing, and may be a little inconsistent at the moment. I think that if Paul McCartney were searching for all of the todo items about his royalties for Yesterday he might face some challenges. I will follow up with more details by email.
How can i search for “all dates prior to date X”? I want to use this to set todos and want to find all todos due before a specific dates (which also would include overdue tasks)
furthermore; must support european date formating. 01.02.2020 is not second of january : it is the first of feb
This seems to be a recurring request… and logically so! We’ll log this for the team to take a look at! ]
One thing that can be done currently is to search from a past month to the current month, which would include all dates in between:
january 2019 – january 2020
… but the moment a specific date is included in the mix, this breaks 🙁
Hi
really good job.
If you really want to make WF a “global” product (and not just US centric), i think you should:
– allow the user to choose between Sunday (US) or Monday (Rest of the world and ISO) as first day of the week
– add other 2 date formats: DD/MM/YYYY (Europe) and YYYY-MM-DD (ISO)
Thanks
Hi Franco! We’re looking into this as we speak!
Thanks a lot! ISO preferred.
I second the ability to choose between Sunday or Monday and the use of ISO. I am from and work in the US, but I use Monday as the start of the week and use ISO format for dates. Thanks!!!
Hi, new user here.
I really love the simplicity of zooming into Workflowy and the ease of adding items. The starred searches are great. Dates are nice to connect my thoughts to time, always a struggle. My thoughts on its development:
Reminders:
A toggle for reminders to stay in the notification bar until completed (and able to be completed from the notification without opening the app) would be great. This is the only way task reminders have worked for me. Sometimes reminders are at inconvenient times and I just need them to stay there until I can get to the task.
Viewing Dated Nodes:
The starred searches are a great way to give flexibility on what we want to see in a date based list. The searches could have built in sorting or grouping options ( “this week” + “sortbydate”, or “this week” + “groupbyday”, or “this week” + “groupbyparent”)
Calendar Integration:
This may be the opposite of what other people are saying, but something to think about: Workflowy date view where Google Calendar events IMPORT INTO Workflowy as their own node (or node-like thing). Then there can be a single Workflowy list with all the events and tasks for a given time range.
Happy 2020!
Definitely the most anticipated feature!
Please do prioritize reminders!
The date is a huge step forward! Congrats to all users and developers.
Here are some personal complaints and suggestions to make the Workflowy even better.
For date feature:
-I do not want to add a date to words like “morning” or “night” every time automatically. The night and morning jump up automatically when searching for a certain date, which is redundant and disturbing.
-Freedom to choose the date format.
Instead of 3:30PM, I’d like to see 15:30
Jan1 is much neater than Jan1st
-Clickability.
I would like to click a certain date to jump right into the searching interface that shows all my tasks on that date(Jan1, 2020,3:30) or within that date(Jan1, 2020,), just like tag. It is troublesome to type or click the date on the search column helper.
-Easier date detectability.
When adding a date tomorrow, I would feel happy to see the date automatically shows up when I finish typing tom or tomo, cause it is painstakingly painful to type tomorrow completely
Further function suggestion:
-We need a node history information on the 3 dots option, including created time and updated time, just like when we view a file on Finder. It is easier to see when we did what so that we can better trace time and manage time. Of course to see the complete update history that includes all changes would be much better though it is hard.
-Maybe we can drag the changed time displayed on the “3 dots option” button to get the node created time. A fancy feature but effective
-For iPhone Workfowy, it is hard to select a space within a word to type or delete. It is troublesome to delete a whole word again and retype it when typing it wrong or forgetting to add a space between words.
-Maybe we want to track project progress through a node circle. A practical idea learned from Omnifocus. The idea is that once we delete an item within a node, a node automatically became a task progress tracker and a small part of a circle, based on the percentage of the completed percentage, became greyer or darker grey so that we have a better sense of how much remaining we need to do to finish.
-Associate tag input. This is another idea learned from OmniFocus that means when typing tags automatically suggests the possible tags that may fit your spelling, even if you spelled it wrong or you spelled it on reverse order. For example, when I want to add a tag #biography, then I type #graphy or #boigraphy, it suggests me to choose #biography anyway.
-Add a recent node section in the sidebar between starred and home. It serves as a short-term memory log for inter-project tasks because It is hard to click back and forth to different layers of a project to check the information. A recent node shows up in a recent node section once you edit it.
-Tag Dragging feature. Easily select a tag and move it to another place of a node or another node. Convenient act.
-Fault spelling recognition. Check spelling issues instantly makes the writing experience more smoothly and more efficiently, especially for students.
-Unlimited endless subnodes width
Expand sub-nodes width in an unlimited so that all my information could be viewed from a single display. Keep every node width the same to provides a better reading experience and users can move page horizontally to check the information because the sentence in one singe line gets gradually narrower as the sub-node level increase. In the sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub.. node, there is only one letter in one single line and there are a scary long line of letters in a single verticle line in my screen
-Intelligent sliding interface.
Move the whole interface horizontally to view a longer node.
Two-finger expand or contract in keyboard to make the words space get bigger or smaller, not the size of the word.
-Automatically capitalize the first word in a node in Mac.
Thank you!
Calendar sync, pls
I think these are amazing and cannot wait to have reminders, snooze etc.
One thing I’d like to see added as well is the ability to copy and paste a date to other lines. Having to manually enter for each is kind of annoying.
Is there a search operator to find all items that either have a date or do not? For instance, right now for dates I use #2020-01-01 (for example), and can filter that in or out. I looked at the search operators but didn’t see anything that might work for this with the new implementation of dates.
Hi Alexander. You’d probably have to go by year: #2019/ #2020. Some folk have been using a “#d-” prefix for date tags (which would be a catch-all way to filter)… however, I’m not sure how this is interacting now with the new dates feature.
I vote for reminders and recurring events. But I can live without reminders. So…. recurring events, with an option to occur at a fixed interval or after completion of current event. Love the dates, though. Only blip in WF’s usefulness for me, gap now closing.
I have been a Pro user of Workflowy for years now. I use the tool for list-making and note-taking of all sorts, be it from simple to do lists for home and more advanced ones for work or breaking down big projects into their smallest steps, lists of books I’ve read or intend to read or TV shows and movies I’m watching or want to see, as a place to keep hold of good recipes (often the complete list of ingredients and instructions just right there in my WF), journaling … Basically just generally storing and making sense of the many things that go through my head on any given day. But I’ve always had to keep using a separate to do app that did have dates, reminders and recurring tasks built-in. I tried to come up with a system using hashtags to give WF that same functionality, but it never really jived with me to do it like that.
So I’m very happen to see dates added to WF now. I love that you’ve chosen to use natural language processing for this, it makes a lot of sense for your product and it makes adding a date to a node a true breeze. I also love that you’ve designed it in the sober, unobtrusive way that makes WF my favourite note-taking and note-keeping tool to use: without getting in the way of you just taking your notes, without bombarding you with all the features it has, without much flash or pump and circumstance it packs a very serious punch. I was worried some of that simplicity would get lost when you started adding more features, so I’m happy to see it’s a concern for you as much as it was for me.
I really like the new search helper, too. I was expecting the dates to be clickable much in the way that hashtags are, but I’ve found it no hassle whatsoever to just go to the search helper to get an overview of all the nodes I’ve attached a certain date or date range to and it makes sense to reserve the ‘clickability’ (is that even a word?) of the date for the extra date-related features you plan in future.
I am not moving all of my tasks to your service just yet, will still need Google Tasks for a little while longer while I wait on reminders (most important) and recurring dates (second most important), but I trust when those come I won’t need any other app to manage my todos anymore.
Just, really great all around and I’m very excited to see what you’re cooking up for 2020.
Yes… “clickability” is a word… in my books!
Calendar sync would be great and an esay way to receive notifications
Upvote
Great to see this added + commitment to add to functionality around it. It really will make Workflowy more attractive to more people – I’ve certainly held off committing to Workflowy for the lack of dates. BUT the world is not all US centred and you need to nail day/month/year dates as a priority above all else. With that flexibility in hand you can really build out and wow a world where dates matter.
Start of week also needs to be specifible on a per user basis – Monday or Sunday. Seems to be Sunday at the moment. Duh – for me.
Agree with this. The US is among the few countries (if not the only) that starts a week on Sunday – this is really confusing.
Searching on Date Ranges is not fully supported yet. You can put in a single search date that will seach correctly on ranges but you can’t put in a range of dates in search I think. So I’d like to search on items with dates in the range July 1st 2000 to Jan 2nd 2020 – cant see that is possoble at the moment. Would also like to see the abilty to seach back for last 6 months, last 90 days, last 7 etc – from Today. Useful as saved search.
I like it! Too bad not on Desktop yet.
Hey Joe, if you don’t see the options in Settings, you’ll need to update your desktop app:
dev.workflowy.com/downloads
Huge! And a wonderful implementation, many thanks for taking the time to do this so well.
One immediate question is whether it is possible to search for “overdue” items, anything with a date in the past?
It’s also great that one can have date ranges on an item, but can I use search to find any date in a range?
Will look forward to the additions in the pipeline. Sorting by date seems the most important to me.
[…] workflowy更新功能：full width page， New left bar和date功能，特别棒。 不再用stylish插件调整宽度；以后可以用left bar更快切换焦点，移动list； 通过输入today等具体日期，方便后续更精确的时间检索。详见官方介绍： WorkFlowy Has A Fancy New Left Bar Dates in WorkFlowy: Try it out […]
Awesome addition. Calendar sync would be fantastic to go along with this. The date search features are great but if I could be reminded automatically via my calendar that would be a game changer. That would move workflowy from an idea organization tool into the realm of a task manger tool as well.
This is great – opens up a new way of working in WF – I don’t typically use dates so I’m curious to jump in.
Given you have a ToDo team looking at this, I’d love to add another simple request. It should be really easy (it seems to me) to be able to filter on things that have been struck through (ie done) vs things that are still remaining.
I realize I can “fake” this by using the search command “-is:incomplete” – and in iOS (and with hotkeys) I’ve taught it to autocomplete this search with the shortcut “-is”. But. Shouldn’t there be a readily, easily clickable “supertag” that does this function?
For example (and you’ll quickly realize I have no idea how code really works, so I’m sure the specifics of this idea are laughable, but hopefully you’ll get the idea) if I could click a “supertag” that was ##complete vs ##notcomplete vs ##all – then I could just readily see items that are done, items that are not done, or all the items. Going to search and typing “-is” and then having to clear the search bar etc multiple times just seems kinda onerous. Is there some way you could implement clickable functions?
Thanks again for all you do and listening to your loyal users.
Jesse, I am finding that the date and search function in WorkFlowy Android is very useful. I am able to quickly add a date by using the format 12/31/20.., I don’t even have to complete entering the year. I used the date and search function to filter for actions to do today on two different projects. I didn’t have to open the entire project to search for those actions.
Good job 🙂 Looking forward to see the reminders, the calendar sync, and the recurring date.
Happy new year 😉
I love the dates and unlike most of your users I won’t use anything in your to-do list. I prefer pulling the data when I want it rather than have it pushed to me with reminders, etc. That said, now I have to rethink my entire system as I created tags to do some of the date things which are now not needed. Unfortunately, the search and replace won’t work in this instance so I’ll just have to access as I go. Also just wondering is the “completed-since:” still working? I wasn’t sure if this changed with the update? Thanks!
Hi Ann,
Yes!… the “completed-since:” operator is still working. You need to have your completed items toggled to visible to see the search results. Here’s the format you can follow:
completed-since:01/31/2018 (mm/dd/yyyy)
Here’s a complete list of “hidden” search operators (with examples), courtesy of @Jay Rawlings:
https://workflowy.com/s/CKZJ.ak9BtViaZU
Wonderful thank you! I am in the process of changing over my dates and for some odd reason when I type in August it defaults to 2019 – I would think it would default to the following year not what has past. Is it possible something might be a miss here?
Hi Ann, I see what you mean. I’m learning as I go too… so my thoughts:
Yes… 2019 is backdated… which might be useful if you’re going to go through archives (maybe not a common use case at the time of date entry)… but the moment you start typing a date, the date helper switches to 2020. I wonder if this is a feature and not a bug?
Great idea. Why not put multiple node status, such as created time, last changed and completed since, into 3 dots option?(hope you guys understand). It woud be more neat for reviewing. Plus insert advanced searching grammar including searching notes that are created on when, changed on when, completed on when. This would help locate data based on time more easily.
Really helpfull! Thank you so much!
Mobile reminders for me is the biggest priority, and I’d like them to be customisable to the extent that I can have the notifications optionally:
– Be persistent (can’t be cleared, have to actually mark the item complete for the notification to be removed)
– Be able to be snoozed, and having ideally 3 durations for how long they can be snoozed (eg swipe open the notification and choose to snooze it for either 5 minutes, 1 hour or 1 day)
And each item should be able to be marked complete from within the notification too.
See Tasks app for Android (Astrid clone by Alex Baker) for an example of what these notifications would look like (almost identical to what I’ve described here).
ya this would be great!
This is amazing! Thank you for continuing to improve this wonderful tool!
This is great news.
Please, please, please add an option for both ISO date format (YYYY-MM-DD) but even more important for me is adding European date formats, DD-MM-YYYY.
I see you have already said you will drop the use of “1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th” etc which I was going to ask that you do.
My ranking for future developments would be:
1. European date format
2. Snoozing items until a certain date
3. Sort by date (and other things)
4. Recurring dates
5. Do stuff when you click on a date (give you choices to search for related dates and turn on the features like reminders and zooming)
A few different formats is a great idea and a popular feature among various web apps. I personally use ISO for everything I can; I’m in the habit of it. I like especially that if I create files or folders on a computer in any operating system, old or new, starting with an ISO-8601 formatted date/time, ISO-8601 can always sort them correctly.
Plus it just looks logical. Even if you manually sort them, highest is always newest.
I understand you’re used to European formatted dates and whether that, American format, Canadian format (a bit different!), or what have you, it really makes working with dates easier if you can see them as you’re used to them.
Am I the only one who thinks this feature is unnecessary? I guess it makes some sense to those who don’t have a calendar structure in Workflowy but for others it doesn’t seem to be very useful. I’m still waiting for a possibility to add existing dots under multiple parents.
For folk like you and I, the foundation that has been built will allow us to use other upcoming useful features… such as reminders/ notifications 🙂
Damipl, I also currently use a calendar structure in Workflowy, that I may retain instead of this format for dates. But one great new feature here that we all can use even if we already have a calendar, are the search terms ‘now’ and ‘today’. They now give us all a ‘Date STamp’ and ‘Time Stamp’, that can be very valuable when taking notes or journaling, and they can work with anyone’s calendar structure.
Great feature I’ve been looking forward to for a while! One feature suggestion I have is to be able to create a place-holder that automatically updates to today’s date. For instance, if we could have something like a [today] or [tomorrow] marker/placeholder that automatically updates to the relevant date each day, that would be great for tagging purposes and for keeping track of daily things and events (hopefully I’ve explained this well).
Cheers!
Hi Spencer,
Is the use case here to have daily recurring reminders?
It would also be great for templates, in addition to recurring (which aren’t always daily 🙂)
Just having a bit more fun and found some issues.
1) I type “Go to Chiquitos @5:00: It offers me 5am, which is in the past
2) I type “Go to Chiquitos @17:00 it renders @Tue, Dec 31st, 2019 at 5:30pm which obscures the fact it’s today!
3) When it renders @Tue, Dec 31st, 2019 at 5:30pm only the Tue is part of the @ tag. With dates off, I get @17:00. If a date is part of a tag, the whole date should be part of the tag.
This is great, keep up the good work.
Thank you for doing all this tinkering!
It’s great that datatypes are creeping in to workflowy, and dates is definitely the place to start. I would like to be able to switch off the “super-helpful” mode and have dates only recognised when starting with a tag, e.g. “#date:” or any “@” that is followed by a partial match to an ISO date format. This would mean
1) you don’t get interrupted mid-flow with the system suggesting that you meant a date
2) the free text is still free text
3) the date-recognition feature complexity is less, so you can support more date formats. #date:2020 #date:Jan:01 is how I write dates right now. That means I can search by year or by month (search for #date:jan finds #date:jan:01), and if searching by month I can narrow down to specific days.
In short:
1) I would like to be able to type freely and use @ to invoke the date parser
2) Please support ISO format or similar heirarchical format like YYYY:MM:DD:HH:MM:SS
I would like image support, let me sync workflowy with a folder in dropbox/google drive/ and just drag drop photos or files and it syncs with google drive and maps the file to the item
1. This is awesome.
2. I use ISO-8601 formatting all the time for dates (YYYY-MM-DD-Thh:mm:ss) etc. It’s a pretty common way to see dates formatted (as an option) for various web apps. The biggest benefit is that if you manually sort it, it sorts properly, whereas other formats don’t. Any chance we can have that presentation as an option?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601
3. Thanks for your consideration as well as both your and your team’s hard work.
Agree with Christoph, for ISO format of dates.
+1 for this
Please ISO-8601 date formatting!!
yes to ISO.
I also support this. Please consider.
I like the self-sorting YYYYMMDD, and will settle for putting separators in there. My documents, photos, and music recordings already support some form of this.
At the very least, allow us to pick this as a format.
+1 for the self-sorting YYYYMMDD !
Another +1 for ISO.
ISO format is a *quality tip* according to W3: https://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/iso-date .
(My personal mantra is: Fahrenheit? Use Centigrade or even Kelvin!)
Yes, please! We all use the YYYYMMDD (ISO_8601 format) here at the studio! Would be great to be able to have it here in WF as well! Thanks!!!
Wonderful!!
Very well and clean implemented!!
Please give the option to start weeks on Monday.
Thanks
Franco
Amazing stuff. Can we search for overdue things? Also, please sorting a-z on things and by date. Really great features added today!
Yes, the ability to search for overdue items would be great!
Great to see this finally and that you guys could make good the promise set out at the beginning of the year..dates. Was hoping for a date picker pop up but this works …The Search helper and full width Page ..awesome features.Thanks
Awesome and thanks!
I would love to priortise (google)”Calendar sync” show I can have a visual view over all my schedule/task of a day.
and I guess – in the meanwhile – some other features like Reminders & Snoozing could then be supported by the calendar app?
Dates! Dates! Wonderful dates! Thank you thank you thank you. I LOVE WORKFLOWY.
Reminders, recurring dates, and sort by date would be hugely helpful at some point in the future, but I love the progress so far.
Calendar sync is the most important one for me, so I can track my notes and works on my everyday work
Amazing! First impressions are wonderful but will need to dive in deeper. One immediate deal-breaker though… desperately need a way to view all tasks due in a single ‘flat’ list…Same goes for tags. *please*… *please*
Hi Zee! I think about you all the time, and in particular this request, which you have elegantly written about. Don’t worry this factors very heavily into my plans for the product, it’s just a few steps down the road. Will definitely happen, and hopefully soon.
I’ve been looking forward dates, and I’m super happy that You’re keeping it clean and simple, thank You for Your awesome work 🙂 Also – Kudos for narrow pages – small change that made working with workflowy much pleasant.
I’ve played with it for a while, I’ve read all the comments, and I wrapped up my feedback / priorities to 3 main suggestions. Some of them stands a little bit against Your todo list 🙂 – I’m just leaving them here for You to think about, and mayby some other users to comment/vote:
1) As couple of other users, I’m using tag based dates right now @ISO (‘@2020-12-31’). The beauty of this approach is that i can use @2020 and @2020-01 as heavilly used yearly and monthly views (I also use @2020-W1 for weekly views). So what I would love to have with this new native dates support in workflowy is being able to use it in similar way as tags:
– @2020-12-31 (with optional hour part) would be recognized as date in current manner. Clicking on it could be same as for tags – filtering for all entries with that date/tag
– @2020-01 would be recognized as @2020-01-01-@2020-01-31 range (but with beautifully short representation of 2020-01. Clicking on it would filter for entries with dates / tags in this range – no other options needed for dates clicks are needed (in my humble opinion).
It would be also nice to be able to add custom format string for dates representation (including possibility to remove day of the week) – but I can wait for it.
2) Calendar Sync is my absolute prioryty above others. Let me start with saying, that as most of the users – I love Workflowy, and prefer it over clones for its beautifull simplicity. It has already replaced a lot of apps i used for note taking, planning, logging, scheduling, creative work etc. But to be honest – I don’t need (or even want) workflowy to be another app generating notofications, when there is a time for something – that is already the role of the calendar app. Workflowy will (probably 🙂 ) never replace google calendar with its vast functionalities in my tool set, so duplicating functionalities that are already implemented in google calendar (and tons of other calendar apps) is in my humble opinion unnecessary, and precoius time of developers can be spent better on things, that only workflowy can do 🙂
Having said that – once workflowy would be synced with calendar (even if it would require waiting longer for it), I don’t think workflowy really needs:
– Any reminders, or notifications (including email, or sms) – one can also have it from google calendar.
– Snoozing – I would greatly prefer having that done directly in my calendar app (meaning syncing date changes from calendar back to workflowy)
– Recouring dates woule be nice addition, as I use workflowy also for managing my routines, but this also should be via passing the reocurrency flag to calendar.
For users that prefer to avoid google – You could provide vcal feed, that could be imported to any calendar app that supports it – leaving workflowy as productivity and planning center 🙂
One additional reason to vote up for calendar sync – it also adresses another oftenly mentioned wish (also one of my biggest) – API for integrating with other apps. Once I can have workflowy data synchronized to calendar, I can pass it to various other API’s from there, and I can wait for workflowy API much longer 🙂
3) partial ranges support – for eample ‘@-2020-12-31’ to display all entries due date, ‘@2020-12-31’- for enteries older than; with same click behaviour as tags (filtering).
As for build-in sort support – it would be nice, but it is doable via bookmarklet right now, so i can wait for it. Ways to add dates with a mouse are irrelevant me.
For the record, point 1 would satisfy my needs about recognition and use of dates
Agree with Bartosz, especially on date formats. I’ve gone to ISO format dates for everything I do, and having that compact clarity in WorkFlowy (and the functionality of “2020-01” = “everything from Jan 1st 2020 to Jan 31st 2020”, for example).
Hi,
doesn’t seem to work in the German version?
I updated, signed in again, but still not working.
Amy ideas?
Hi Markus,
Have you gone into your Settings menu and toggled “Dates” and “Search Helper” on (under experimental features)?
Love it! Great work.
>
Jesse,
Here’s one thought (take it or leave it). In the article you mention that for now there’s no options for adjusting the formatting of dates. One thing I would love is if the “rd”s and “st”s were dropped on the end of the days. So “Mon, Dec 3rd, 2019” would just be “Mon, Dec 3, 2019”.
When I was learning about graphic design I was told that adding those extra suffixes after dates were a confusion of how someone should speak it versus how it should be properly written. So “Dec 3” on paper is pronounced “Dec 3rd” when read aloud.
Like I said, take it or leave it. I’m sure it’s something you considered when deciding your date format. But not including the suffixes I feel like may make more sense.
Thanks for the incredible app and the huge recent improvements!
Craig
Agree that I’d like to lose the letters following the day of the month. In a written format is just looks cluttered.
Yes, happy to do this. Thanks for the feedback.
No more agree. It looks super redundant when the suffix is placed within a long length of words. Plus we all know what it means seeing dec30, so dec 30th is not necessary.
Agreed. That might make the USA formatting just about ok for us inhabitants of the Old World.
Otherwise a good move.
I am also going to agree with this one. It feels unnecessary to add “th” and “st” after the date. But am loving the addition of the dates feature.
Very nice but You change Dark theme to pro mode. Not nice, very disappointed 🙁 – I don`t need pro version, free is sufficient for me.
ya completely agree they should switch vintage and dark mode.
Thanks Jesse. Love the new feature. Definitely going to need recurring dates, snoozing and sort-by-date so I can retire my dedicated todo app and do all my note taking and productivity management in the one place.
Same situation is here for me also…
Awesome! Great to see some movement on the feature front.
This is something I’ve been looking forward to very much. Thank you!!
Craig
Wow, love it, thank‘s so much! Still missing for me to replace my Todo-list: Reminders and sort by date. Looking forward to it
+1