Get Everything Done

I have been a WorkFlowy user since 2015, and have built all my personal management systems in it....so I will be deploying the mechanics in "Do It Tomorrow" into WorkFlowy as well, and was wondering if anyone else has done the same.

I tried it amongst others but settled on the paid version of Dynalist recently. I don’t remember why I rejected Workflowy but it was probably because I was only looking at free versions at the time and it was limited to 250 bullets a month. I use Dynalist for Autofocus at the moment for which it is ideal. I may have another look at Workflowy when my Dynalist subscription is due for renewal. Or I might brave the Notion learning curve as it’s free for personal use.

Ian,

I get that...all the subscription fees add up. I used WorkFlowy before it went to a monthly fee, so I was grandfathered in, but eventually went to paid because I found it so ridiculously useful, and because the pro version includes daily DropBox backup.

I have played around with Notion, which is super-cool! Try out watching some of August Bradley's stuff on YouTube, if you haven't already. His "knowledge vault" version of a zettelkasten system was helpful to me and I used several of his thoughts in my WorkFlowy Zettelkasten system.

I found that for the type of systems I create, WorkFlowy worked better than Notion because WorkFlowy is more effortlessly flexible than Notion is. Notion does have some mechanics that WorkFlowy doesn't have, which can be useful for some people's systems, and I think that Notion is much better as a way to present ideas and products than WorkFlowy is...so I build things in WorkFlowy, but find Notion is a great option for sharing polished products.

If you do decide to try out WorkFlowy again, let me know and I'll send you an invite to the WorkFlowy Slack community, which is a rowdy bunch of system builders who have landed on WorkFlowy as the "One App to Rule them All" 🤣

Dave

Hi Dave,

I use Workflowy (I am J R on the slack channel). Unlike your setups (assuming your alias is Cafe) I find just making a long list works best, though I have been playing with making subtasks and mirroring them on the long list, but it may be more more trouble than it is worth, tag search works just fine.

For Workflowy to be the perfect MF list it needs two things Dynalist already has, colors (to indicate items that stand out) and a shortcut to move to bottom of the list to reflect the "little and often" principle. I can do both in WF but it would be easier if these were natively implemented.

Oh...hey J R! Fancy meeting you over here! Yep, this is Café655☕ I'm pretty sure Jesse and the WorkFlowy team are currently working on color coding...and I agree that move to bottom would be useful...for now I use WFx to do that kind of thing.

You guys have been holding out on us, keeping Mark Forster to yourselves! I guess I am going to have to include reading his books and apparently this entire blog into my inbox for future work!

@J R...you said "For Workflowy to be the perfect MF list it needs two things Dynalist already has"

What does "MF" stand for? I filled in the blank with a cussword, but I doubt that is what you meant. 😂

Oh....just realized you meant Mark Forster...not what I had thought 😎

Dave

Thanks for the kind offer of an invitation to Workflowy Slack community. I now remember I was impressed by the collaborative atmosphere around Workflowy, something I haven’t found with Dynalist unless I’m missing something.

I hadn’t realised August Bradley had posted about Zettelkasten, a concept which intrigues me, without drawing me in completely, if I’m honest. I fear I would miss opportunities to link new entries to earlier ones to highlight a connection between them because who is going to remind me of the earlier entry so that I can remind myself of it? If I’ve looked away from my laptop since I made the previous note then I have forgotten it exists. Rather reminiscent of relying heavily on tags in Evernote. A commentator once pointed out that if you forget to tag a single note in keeping with whatever system of tagging you’ve created then you’ve just kiboshed the whole system. I have the same fear for zettelkasten. Maybe Bradley’s method overcomes this. He’s produced a lot of videos. I think I’ll watch one a day till I catch up.

Ian

Ian, I get that frustration with the idea of missing possible connections. I take Forte Labs concept of progressive summarization to heart and use that at multiple levels in my life...essentially, the idea is to summarize (a book ,or article, or whatever) further when needed.

So, maybe grab an article that looks interesting and put it where ever you store ideas...then, if (and only if) you find that you go back to that article and want to synthesize it or think about it again do you summarize it more...and if you go back to it again, summarize/distill it further...each time you find something useful, distill and absorb it more.

But if you grab an article and read it, but find you don't actually go back to it, then it probably is something that isn't worth working through.

I have taken the structure of that thought and deployed it broadly in my life...collect to my hearts content, but don't think that I need to work on everything to the same degree...so in my Knowledge Lab node in WorkFlowy, I collect and organize things with the following template:

Zettelkasten #template
UID:
Tags:
Links:
Source:
My thoughts:
Content:

And have started imputing new things in that format instead of just grabbing a chunk of text from someplace and pasting it in with no source info, no tags, no links, etc.

So, I now have lots of inputs that use that format, which is helpful. When I find something in my Knowledge Vault node from before that I find I go back to, or link to other things, then I reformat it to that new format...because it has proved it is worth it...and things that I find I don't go back to as a resource haven't "earned" my attention.

Do I wish all of my several thousand ZK ideas are formatted and interlinked? Yep! Is this way of doing things perfect? No...but it is better than anything I have done before and is heading in the right direction, I think. Progress over perfection...that is all I can hope for in most things in my life!

And I have found that by taking that approach, my Zettelkasten is more organic than mechanical...I throw seeds in and see what grows.

for me: thinking; the interior life; the contemplation and the small epiphanies...this is the most enjoyable aspect of my life, and I decided to create a Zettelkasten that is more a tool of play than of work.

Which is one reason I knew that "Do It Tomorrow" was an important resource...I found myself IMMEDIATELY synthesizing it, and resynthesizing it to the point that I took a few days off to read it, highlight and take notes on it, then summarize it and now I have a pretty distilled version of it available to me to continue to absorb and utilize on my Traffic Control WorkFlowy Board (my home board that I look at all day)...summarized to the following headings: Commitments, Open/Closed Lists, Current Initiatives, and Organization Structures...which I am now using as a conversation partner as I integrate it into my GTD/Scrum/Fractal/Margin-rich Calendar-centric personal management system. Yesterday my closed Will Do list functioned quite amazingly well at giving clarity to my day! Looking forward to today/tomorrow where I begin to embed the mechanics into my weekly planning session.

And I am sure that I will continue to resynthesize and distill it as I begin to practice it until it reaches some kind of equalibrium for me

THEN...I will have to read some more of Mark's work. I am excited to have a found a content creator who's thoughts resonate so deeply with me and my systems!

Dave,

Slightly belated thanks for the insight into your system.

I think I was guilty of expecting perfection in a system - one of any good procrastinator’s most potent weapons!

I used to use Workflowy as well but have migrated to Dynalist for similar reasons as stated above.

I have found my number one tip that would apply to either is to actually resist all those indented subpoints!

I do of course use them but I find that when using a long list and scanning it I need to have the details on the line I'm looking at not buried 3 levels deep. I do keep reference notes in indented sub-lines but I often update the top level bullet point with the next thing to do so I can easily see it when I scan.

So for example instead of "Upgrade Software Project" as the line with a bunch of sub-bullet points to weed through, I would have "Upgrade Software Project- send communication email to teams"

When that is done and I'm thinking about what would be next I would then look at the bullet points that are nested below and bring up the next acton to the main bullet point and move it to the bottom of the list. Something like "Upgrade Software Project- get final sign off for approvals"

This has made it so much easier for me to scan and know what to do than just seeing "Upgrade Software Project" each time I look at it.

Brent

Brent,

The reasons I found mentioned for not using WorkFlowy is because the free version has limited nodes...is that the reason you don't use it?

I do indent a lot as needed, but decide in what format I will need to see the information in the situation I will want it, and make sure that the way I input the information and tag or embed the information will produce the kinds of reports that I want. It ends up being quite simple to produce the results I want.

Dave

After using my paid Workflowy subscription for quite a while I converted in 2018 to Dynalist which in my practical experience is superior to Workflowy.

I use Dynalist to operate my whole life since, from projects to my daily to-dos, from calendar appointments and their preparation to drafting my speeches and preparing interviews, discussions and articles. Dynalist is my PKM and Zettelkasten and contains the golden core of my operative system: my organized routines, processes, checklists and my many question lists (I fell in love with a question oriented life a few years ago and I entertain in Dynalist a separate Question Journal, which I fill up daily/nightly!). However, I am convinced that in the end, Workflowy could realize much of that, too.

One aspect all these apps have in common (and I have to remind myself time and again): In the end, Dynalist and Workflowy, Obsidian and Roam etc. are tools, to be shaped by us and not the other way around (despite McLuhan), extremely helpful to win battles, but not deciding the war!

Dave,

Perhaps it was the colors and the ability to do separate documents. I can't recall if I liked the mobile experience better on on vs the other....

I just logged into my old Workflowy account via the web. (Yes there was still stuff there). By the looks of it, I was using Workflowy in 2015 as well. I was a pro user with Workflowy for a while as well so it wasn't the cost. I'm a pro user with Dynalist today. .

I am intrigued by the "Board" view.

Other than the items above there really isn't much difference. Both are great list making and outlining tools with very little resistance and a lot of flexibility both of which I think that is key to a Mark Forster System.

Brent

JGL,

" and my many question lists (I fell in love with a question oriented life a few years ago and I entertain in Dynalist a separate Question Journal, which I fill up daily/nightly!"

Have you written about this anywhere else? I am highly intrigued by the phrase "a question oriented life"

I, too, find questions to be a beautiful way to orient myself, and would thoroughly enjoy reading anything you have to say about that topic.

David, in his books "Dreams" and "Secrets" Mark talks extensively about the questioning techniques. More recently, on this site and blog, Mark examined the merit of various types of questions as alternative to simple "standing out" when working with a Long List system.

David,

Thank you, indeed questioning is an issue which as an applied tool found its way late into my life and keeps fascinating me.

I made a long and promotion-wise very good career in government as a “man of answers”. Having ready-made answers for everything and directing my staff by answers was my idea of responsible leadership – following the then global business culture’s paradigms (and abandoning my own thorough humanistic school education in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, particularly Socrates’ questioning way to take up the puzzling issues of the human mind).

But I became increasingly aware in my daily practice that answers most of the time only pretend to present a final truth and often disguise vast uncertainties/ insecurities. Niels Bohr’s statement “The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.” and the tradition of well-known scientific errors made me reassess my own deep-seated beliefs that any problem can have one perfect and true answer only. Throughout human history, infinite numbers of answers proved to be dead wrong – but questions persisted.

Reading what Mark Forster and Marshall Goldsmith have said and written about the pivotal role question-orientation could play in our operative life, thinking, in problem-solving and deciphering the complexities of modern life led me to a kind of gradually evolving “epiphany” and the decision or even urge, to change my life’s paradigms from answers to questions.

Since, I start each new project and each problem with a list of questions, before taking it up with others or consulting literature or the Internet about it – updating the lists with each further step. I developed thoroughly daily (monthly, annual) question lists to keep my professional/ personal goals, values and associated processes consistently under review. As already mentioned I started a personal Question-Journal which harbours all my daily questions – big or small - in a freestyle manner. In my staff meetings, I introduced questions as our main approach to strategic and operative problems - though with the proviso that in the end, we would have to take an (if somehow possible: shared) decision. This, too, brought excellent results and secured much better support of the decisions taken by all.

My intellectual life has changed since, my thinking became richer and more multidimensional, my discussions professionally and with family and friends more thoughtful, open and joyful, I developed more empathy for others. Recognizing that questions open doors whereas answers close them made me more confident to enter new areas and angles of thinking – deepening my understanding of the many interests I always had.

I could continue ad nauseam but hope the above explains a little bit my enthusiasm for my discovery of questions as a central tool to guide my life and thinking!