Whether you’re a lifelogger who logs the metrics of your every waking moment – or you’re just wanting to log a couple of key areas in your life, WorkFlowy has a brilliant solution involving tags… and counting those tags. It’s one of those “Why-didn’t-I-think-of-this?” type dynamics. I’m going to show you how to record Pomodori (time blocks of 25 minutes), sales figures, “Don’t break the chain!” routines… and pretty much anything that answers the questions, “How much?” or “How long?” in graphical structures resembling…no, exactly like charts. In WorkFlowy. Then Rawbytz is going to take you to WorkFlowy Wonderland with his WFcount Bookmarklet. Oh, and I’ll post a complimentary download link to the “Stylish” chapter of my book.
All your ducks in a row
You’re going to need to use a “Monospace” font to make things line up nice and pretty in WorkFlowy. WorkFlowy Pro users have two such fonts bundled into the Settings menu: Typewriter and Terminal.
A Monospace font gives you equally sized, fixed-with characters. So if your tags have an equal amount of characters, they will line up – that is if your prefixed (date) info. has an equal number of characters on each line.
Here are my sleeping patterns since January 1st (I’m using the Stylish extension, by the way):
- Each dark gray block is a “#z” tag, representing 30-minute increments of sleep.
- Each light gray block is an “#n” tag, which shows 30-minute periods of napping during the day.
WorkFlowy minimalism: no prettified tags
If you’re not into the Stylish extension (or predominantly use a mobile device), you can hit any tag to filter for all instances, and you get yellow highlighted tags. Here are my book-sales figures from October 26th to November 29th. Each “#b” tag represents a book/ unit sold (I’ve flipped this iPad screenshot on its side):
Color my world
The following screenshot shows my book sales over the last 3 months:
He works hard for the money
I do a lot of Pomodori. That is to say, for focused periods of concentration, especially when writing, I break my work down into 25-minute-time-boxed-bite-sized blocks of time. Here’s a WorkFlowy graphic of the amount of Pomodori I put into writing my book (I’ll give you some figures in a bit). Each block you see is just a “#pwf” tag:
Don’t Break the Chain!
You’ve got to try Jerry Seinfeld’s “Don’t Break the Chain!” productivity method. I’ve written about it in my book, but here I’m expanding on things visually. Here’s the time I’ve put in to the WorkFlowy blog since January 4th:
I have a small list I’m currently keeping track of in WorkFlowy. Some items are part of a Don’t break the chain! effort, while others I simply record at the end of the day. The items with the ∞ signs are ones that I don’t want to break the chain on. Here’s my template:
If I filter for my “#fdr” tag, you’ll see my Don’t break the chain! routine for improving my culinary skills and knowledge about food in general. I put aside 10 minutes a day – every day – to learn something new about food or pull a great recipe off the web. So far I haven’t broken the chain. Neither have I broken the chain with any such routine I’ve manned up to in the past:
- Notice that here, I am not interested in how much time I’ve spent on this particular activity… what is highly motivational to me is seeing that I have an uninterrupted series of lime-colored tags. You’ll only experience the power of this productivity hack once you’ve tried it for yourself (in or out of WorkFlowy).
I’ve started learning PHP as part of an effort to learn to code for WordPress. I set aside a Pomodoro (25 minutes every day) to systematically learn something new. I haven’t broken the chain yet (albeit early days!):
What if you or I were to break the chain? I shudder to think… but just for argument’s sake:
Above you will see that I record how many TV Series episodes I watch daily. I’m not trying to not break the chain on this one. But… you will see that on January 4th and 11th, I was not able to indulge in this guilty pleasure. Actually, no guilt there. Those black tags really stick out! You’ll notice that in the search bar I’m filtering for “tvs”:
- “#tvs” is my tag for an occurrence
- “@tvs” is my tag for a non-occurrence
- Thus, to filter for both, I search for “tvs” This is the tell-all letter combination.
- The same goes for all other tags… they come in two’s. A colored tag and a black tag (in case).
Logging VS. doing
I keep the above metrics in my “Lifelogging” outline and link to my “@DBTC” (Don’t break the chain!) outline, nestled under “Not Urgent/ Important” in my “Eisenhower Matrix”. In this outline, I have a small list of activities I focus on daily:
- I also link from here to my “Lifelogging” outline
- I keep a tally of days covered for each effort or project and a minimum of time I’d like to spend on each. Each of these lists either contains an internal WorkFlowy link to the actual project outline in another part of WorkFlowy… or actually contains the entire project itself right there.
I’m creating a list of all the Unicode characters known to man, which I will share with WorkFlowy users once I’m done. I have a nice little system which will help you find those hard-to-get characters you usually need to Google to find:
Here’s what the inside of my Food/ Recipe research outline looks like:
This and that: Juxtaposing
Because I have date information at the beginning of each bullet, I get to dice up my information any which way I want when I filter for months or days: I could filter for specific days in specific months by using the search syntax, “Jan Mon”. I could compare sleep patterns for different days by using the OR operator: “Mon OR Sun”, and WorkFlowy will narrow things down for me.
Below you’ll see that I’m filtering for number of hours slept and number of Pomodori spent learning PHP over the last 3 days. Since I squeeze my code-learning in last thing in the evening, it’s no mystery that the more I learn, the less I sleep at night (light gray blocks). Of course, I don’t need WorkFlowy metrics to tell me that I’m losing sleep over something in particular. This example serves to illustrate how one can juxtapose any data you want:
WFcount bookmarklet
If you’re an Android, like Lt. Commander Data (from Star Trek’s, TNG), you won’t be needing a tag-count tool. In fact, you won’t need WorkFlowy. But for all humanoid WorkFlowy fans (excluding alien races like the Bynars who have synaptic processors), Rawbytz’s WFcount tool is a must have. With a click of a bookmarklet, you get a count of all tags in any context (and some other goodies) sorted by title.
Whether it’s for research purposes, compiling a WorkFlowy tag index… or getting a tag count for your Lifelogging data, WFcount has got you covered. For many, this will get your blood going. See Rawbytz’s post to understand the pun. Installing the bookmarklet in any browser is a one-click (drag) action. It doesn’t get any simpler. So no excuses. Visit Rawbytz’s blog and get the WFcount bookmarklet.
Let’s apply Rawbytz’s WFcount tool to a couple of my outlines above:
What we glean from the above WFcount window is that I’ve sold 804 books over the last 90 days. I get 104 children lists – which is accurate, since I’ve nested my data in weekly outlines – because I like it that way… so one needs to be aware of what’s going on in any outline and adjust the numbers if necessary. The tag count, however, is accurate – down to the last book.
Below you’ll see that it took me 1058 Pomodori (529) hours to write and publish my book. Since I’ve nested my data across 5 months, I know this particular project took me 120 days exactly from start to finish. And I get all of this information instantaneously by zooming into a particular outline and hitting the WFcount bookmarklet in my browser’s toolbar:
You can even install this bookmarklet on Mobile!
Wait a second! How about those color tags?!
The tweaked CSS code came from Rawbytz’s “WorkFlowy Custom Tag Colors” theme and the inspiration came from Stefano Rausch’s “Zen Colour Labels” – both on userstyles.org, which is an index of themes that can be used with the Stylish extension.
Also… about that book chapter on Stylish I promised. Click here and the PDF will start downloading in your default browser immediately.
And… here’s a shared WorkFlowy list with my own personal Lifelogging Tags CSS that you can copy to Stylish and tweak as you wish.
When filtering for/ clicking on any of your colored tags, if you’d like to get rid of the search result highlight color, you can temporarily activate the following style:
/* Search result color */
.content .contentMatch {
background-color: transparent;
color: transparent !important;
}
UPDATE: Since a couple of users have reached out and asked for a template to tinker with, I figured I’d share the link to the general “Lifelogging” outline I use daily. Just keep in mind that it will look nothing like you see in the screenshots above until you are both using a Monospace font and have the right CSS code installed in the Stylish extension.
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