In a couple of days I’ll post the first of a series of interviews about WorkFlowy. I’ll be chatting to some notable WorkFlowy users who’ll be sharing how they squeeze what out of WorkFlowy. There are some interesting folk lined up – but at the end of the day, they’re just like you and I. We’re all about WorkFlowy.
Over the next weeks and months I’ll be rubbing shoulders with many more of you WorkFlowy fans. If you think you’ve got a unique WorkFlowy perspective or a story to tell, please drop me a line at frankman777@gmail.com
So as not to leave you empty-handed today, and since I’m the one writing this post, I guess I’ll have to go ahead and interview myself then:
FRANK 1: Hi Frank 2, thanks for allowing me to interview you.
FRANK 2: The pleasure is all mine. Hey… why do you get to be Frank 1?
FRANK 1: Moving on… I wanted to ask you – If there was any one dynamic that you could pull directly out of your book and shamelessly promote to all of us, what would it be? Would you mind if I shared it on the WorkFlowy blog?
FRANK 2: Sure. It’s definitely got to be what I call, “List Title Tags“. Although it’s not exactly a WorkFlowy breakthrough, without it, navigating my WorkFlowy document would be way slower:
List Title Tags – from A to B that much faster
At the time of writing I’ve been watching Star Trek: DS9. The space station, Deep Space Nine, is located near the mouth of a recently discovered Bajoran wormhole, which allows access to the distant Gamma Quadrant. This wormhole makes passage from the Alpha Quadrant to the Gamma Quadrant – a distance of 70,000 light years – almost instantaneous (whereas it would ordinarily take a Federation starship 67 years to go the distance). The Bajoran wormhole is the only known stable wormhole in the Milky Way Galaxy with a terminus (mouth) located in both quadrants.
This is a picture of what I call “List Title Tags”. I usually put a tag in a parent list “terminus” and another in a child list “terminus” buried a number of lists deep. This tag might either substitute the title of a list or add an “@” to a keyword in the list title to modify it. When one engages (clicks on) a tag in a parent list, it will connect you to a tag in a child list, no matter how deep in the hierarchy. Then one simply clicks on the bullet of the child list to zoom in. Just like the Bajoran wormhole, these tags are “stable” in the sense that I keep them as permanent “terminuses”.
Below you will see a portion of my task list for @TODAY, ordered by priority. By looking at the breadcrumb navigation bar at the top of the image, you’ll notice that it would have taken 4 clicks to get here by clicking on one list at a time starting from the home page:
Another instance of this tag is found on the home page – which actually substitutes the list title of my list where all my actionable items are tucked away. It represents one of the most frequently visited children lists therein:
When I click on the @TODAY tag (not the bullet point) on my home page, I get the following filtered search results:
You’ll see 3 @TODAY List Title Tags which are 3 of the contexts/ lists I visit daily within this parent list:
- My Kanban Calendar (for general task management)
- My journal for “thinking about thinking”
- A health log, containing a record of exercise routine, etc.
So it’s one click on my home page to get to the above search result… and from there, not only will it take just a second click to get to to my task list for today… but also I have a tailor-made menu to cherry-pick from.
I hope a light went on with this simplest of hacks. This focuses specifically on how tags help to navigate one’s established nested hierarchies of lists – the architecture you’ve set up for the broad categories: we know where our lists are, but we just want to get there effortlessly. These tags are permanent fixtures, until you decide to restructure things, that is.
FRANK 1: Ummm… OK. Thanks for that. I think that will be all for now.
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