Have you ever sent a Workflowy item into the great beyond only to later wish you could somehow recover it?
Well now you can with our trash can feature! You can now browse previously deleted items and choose to either restore them to their former glory or delete them permanently.
You no longer have to worry about accidentally deleting something important like top secret three-letter agency notes or grandma’s pecan pie recipe, you can always recover it if you need to.
How do I use it
The trash can feature can be accessed from the menu bar under the “Trash” option.
Clicking this brings up a window that allows you to browse the most recently deleted items and a small preview of their content if any.
From here you can choose to either restore an item or permanently delete it.
You can also choose to load more items if the item you want to restore was deleted further back in time.
Please note that it may take a moment or two for our servers to take the items out of cryogenic storage and reanimate them. For large items it can take a bit longer than that but they will eventually show up.
Note
After you permanently delete an item there is no way for us to restore it, so be sure you really want to delete something before you do it 🔥
Update: We’ve added an “Empty trash” button
The “Empty trash” feature will be released next Tuesday, December 7th 2021.
To use it, scroll down to the bottom of your trash and you’ll see a little, “Empty trash” button. Click it, and it will go through and permanently delete everything in your trash.
Tue, Nov 30, 2021
🤯 Hate this feature? Think we’re idiots who don’t care about our users? Read this.
This is Jesse, the founder/CEO of Workflowy.
We’ve seen a lot of pretty brutal comments on this post along the lines of, “WHY THE @%*$ DID YOU BUILD THIS?!?” and “You don’t don’t care about your users, or listen to them!” This truly hurts to hear. I care deeply about our users, and try to listen. I can also understand why you feel that way, particularly if you’ve been around a long time.
I’m responsible for choosing what we work on. I’ll explain a little what we’re doing here and why I chose to build the Trash feature.
Why did you build a $@%ing trash feature?
I built the trash feature to free up my time, and to help the Workflowy users in the most pain. The users suffering most in Workflowy land are those who accidentally delete some mission critical data. I have a policy that our employees do not access user data. Therefore, I took it upon myself to restore accidentally deleted nodes for people manually. This took up some of my time, stressed me out, and made people wait a long time before getting data back. Thus, to free up my time, and fix one of the worst experiences someone can have in Workflowy, I prioritized this.
Why isn’t the @#$%ing trash feature perfect?
The comments are split between hating that we spent any time building a trash feature and complaining that we didn’t spend more time making it perfect. I was trying to just get it done, get something out there that could help people restore their stuff. I was aiming for “good enough to be useful”.
How do you prioritize features? Why do you ignore your users?
Broadly, I think about three categories of product improvements: stuff people want, strategic stuff, and stuff that moves toward my vision. For now, let me talk now “stuff people want”.
We care what people want. We have been working diligently through user requests over the past year. We have taken multiple surveys to understand what people’s top priorities are, and we have started to build the things people are asking for.
The top two requests were images/files and color formatting. Both are now built and released. Look at this list of top user requests from our forum, and see how many of them are complete. It’s a lot. We are committed to making the improvements you want, polishing Workflowy, and expanding what it can do. Now, I know we haven’t done enough for everyone or moved as quickly as we’d like, but we’re trying.
I’m genuinely sorry that we’ve frustrated so many people. Hopefully one day we’ll get to the point where you feel only delight and joy when you think about Workflowy.