Have you given
Workflowy a try? I think I love it. I really hope it lasts. I like to try productivity type apps when they come along. I almost never end up liking them. They always seem to make things even more complicated, but I have never let go of the dream of becoming an organized efficiency machine. Plus there's the age thing. I don't care what anyone says; most of us start having brain leaks once we reach a certain age. At least about nine out of ten people I know do. As far as I can recall. Our office, which does not practice age discrimination, is full of people desperately trying just about anything we can think of to remember where we put that, what we came in here for and what we were just working on. Yes, there are a lot of reasons why we're great employees, but steel trap type memory is not among them. Lists and sticky notes are what stand between us an utter disaster. Since new apps are almost always created by people who are just barely out of puberty I bet the creators of Workflowy would be surprised at the idea that they've come up with a thing that could be the killer app for the elder set, but I think it could. In fact, if this thing has a mobile app, now or in the future it might be the ONLY thing that would make it try to figure out how to afford a data plan for my phone.
Most recently I've been using a simply sticky note application to approximate what Workflowy does, but of course, Workflowy does it much better and more robustly. It's that simple, though. It's just about lists, but the combination of the potential depth and the simplicity of the interface is what makes it so useful. What I mean is, you don't have to look at it and think, "Now what did I call that list I was looking for?". Your lists of lists is right there. Genius!
It needs a few more touches, of course, and they'll probably appear shortly if Workflowy is successful. They probably won't need my wishlist, but I'm making one anyway:
- Widgets. You have to have widgets for home pages, etc. so that your organization-impaired users don't actually have to navigate to the site to see their most important to-do thingies.
- Collaboration. I never, ever use collaboration tools, but this cries out for sharing. With a notation as to who last edited a shared list in case we forget to write it down. I can totally see this being useful at work. Totally.
- Sharing. I guess. I never do this either, but there must be some way that you can use this with Facebook. I assume that you can use anything in the world with Facebook. I kind of hate Facebook, but that is really a whole other post.
Alas, all I have is a phone that texts by the 'press four times for /s/'. The rest of the family is more up-to-date. I figure navigating my 'keyboard' is good for my brain cells...
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