Do way, way more in WorkFlowy, 1st Edition © 2015 Frank Degenaar Published by Frank Degenaar, -3.72541, -38.49859 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, contact the publisher: [email protected] For Emma-Pearl: Each Pomodoro spent on this book meant less beach time for you. Though you don’t yet know all about lists and productivity, you’re on almost all of my lists... and hands down, the #1 beneficiary of my @Future-me tag. Contents READ ME MEET YOUR BRAIN WorkFlowy - Where have you been all my life? What I use WorkFlowy for Walter Bishop’s brain What, technically, is WorkFlowy? Show and tell - The WorkFlowy basics A NEW SKIN FOR YOUR BRAIN - STYLING A WorkFlowy facelift with Stylish Painter for WorkFlowy ORGANIZE YOUR BRAIN - SETUP Feed me Seymour! It’s a Kanban magic Nested lists Nested lists and GTD NAVIGATE YOUR BRAIN - FROM A TO B List Title Tags Workflow tags List hyperlinks Breadcrumb navigation Starred pages viewer Meet Ctrl+Shift+9 & Ctrl+Shift+0 FAST-TRACK YOUR BRAIN - KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS The Tetris Effect Navigating stuff Expanding/ collapsing stuff Selecting stuff Moving stuff Copying/ duplicating stuff Deleting, completing (& exploding) stuff Miscellaneous shortcuts SEARCH YOUR BRAIN The whole search and nothing but the search - so help me WorkFlowy Hidden search operators - WorkFlowy’s search language Saved searches Filtering tags vs. searching keywords NETWORK YOUR BRAIN - MORE ON TAGS Your positronic brain Basic tag types - Pick a tag, any tag Transfer any list anywhere Tag index basics Contexts within contexts - a no-brainer tag index Compiling a mega alphabetized tag index - the WorkFlowy blog Exploratory tags PRIORITIZE YOUR BRAIN - TASK MANAGEMENT Just do it The Eisenhower Matrix Kanban The tickler file The tickler file and recurring tasks The tickler file vs date tags Date tags and a date tag index Kanban Calendar Don’t break the chain! The Pomodoro technique A home-page workspace Delegating Tailor-made action tags TRACK YOUR BRAIN - JOURNALING Get your Doogie Howser on Accessibility and a visual cue Tag-ability Filtering - The stuff of life PUBLISH YOUR BRAIN (1) - 3RD-PARTY TOOLS Markdown - What goes down must come up Markdown syntax - From the bottom up PhraseExpress - Expand your mind PhraseExpress - Autotext PhraseExpress - Simulated keypresses PhraseExpress for Markdown PhraseExpress - A workflow toolbox Dropbox and Evernote Exporting Markdown inline images WorkFlowy to Gingko to Word Word to InDesign PUBLISH YOUR BRAIN (2) - A BOOK-WRITING WORKFLOW From start to finish Ideation and a tag index Ghost Bullets Metric tags Editing and revision tags A continuity/ error checklist Internal InDesign book links in WorkFlowy InDesign paragraph style tags in WorkFlowy Markdown elements to any InDesign style END OVER END Best of you Next year Big me Home Read me Here are a few quick pointers on getting around this PDF document… as well as some consolidated references for all shared resources scattered throughout these pages. 1. Breadcrumb navigation bar #Getting-around Each page in this book has a breadcrumb navigation bar which lets you know exactly where you are - not unlike in the WorkFlowy app itself. Also, each has 3 clickable links which take you to where you imagine they would go: • HOME: This link will take you to the table of contents. • SECTION: Follow the 2nd link to the current section’s content page. • CHAPTER: The 3rd link will land you back at the beginning of the current chapter. 2. Zoom-able bullet points #Getting-around You can click/ tap on any of the bullet points in the Table of Contents (Home) and on the Section Contents pages. They will take you to the chapters and subsections given. To go to any Section Con- tents page from the main Table of Contents, click on the section’s title text. 3. Red and blue hyperlinks #Getting-around • Red links are external hyperlinks. These will link to sites from your default web browser. • Blue links are internal hyperlinks which connect you to relevant cross-referenced content. 4. Backtracking after following any link #Getting-around After having clicked on any link(s) in this PDF on desktop, you should be able to hit Alt+Left/ Right to navigate back and forth. On mobile device, in whatever app you’re using, you should have options to backtrack via some page link arrows. Home > Read me 5. Keyboard shortcuts on Mac #My-bad To those readers on Mac OS X: One day I hope to be have the privilege of tinkering on my very own Mac. Perhaps in the 2nd edition of this book I will include all Mac keyboard shortcuts too. However, I do think most Mac users are sufficiently savvy to figure out the equivalent of the Windows shortcuts given in this book. Also, your WorkFlowy keyboard shortcuts help menu should come in handy. 6. Shared lists #Resource I’ve shared a number of individual WorkFlowy lists throughout this book. These are public lists that you are welcome to add to your account or just view online. Each of them presents hands-on dynamics that you can tinker with and test. Just in case you lose track of where the links are in this book, I’ll share a consolidated list with you here - which has each of the shared lists nested therein. You can zoom into any of the lists there and then add them to your account. NOTE: Please be aware of your monthly list limit if you are not yet a WorkFlowy Pro member. 7. Stylish code blocks #Resource Included in the above shared WorkFlowy list, you’ll also find the Stylish templates which are blocks of CSS code that will come in handy later - if you’re up to giving WorkFlowy a face lift, that is. 8. Animated GIFs #Resource I’ve created a number of 5-second Animated GIFs to show you the moving parts of WorkFlowy in certain scenarios. In each case, I have linked to a (safe) public Evernote note… and in each case presented, all you do is click on any one of the conspicuous GIF icons in this book to take you there. 9. .pxp files #Resource Here are 2 .pxp files (PhraseExpress) in a shared Dropbox folder. These PhraseExpress files may come in handy later. 10. Complimentary future editions #Say-what? If you registered your e-mail at the time of purchasing this book, I will send you a complimentary download link when all future editions come out. I’m aiming for mid 2016 (at the very latest) for my 2nd edition, which will have the new sections I’ve hinted at in a few places… and then some. Home Meet your brain WorkFlowy - Where have you been all my life? What I use WorkFlowy for Walter Bishop’s brain What, technically, is WorkFlowy? Show and tell - The WorkFlowy basics Home > Meet your brain WorkFlowy - where have you been all my life? There are outliners... and then there are outliners When one begins to tinker with an outliner, you get the sneaky feeling that there’s more to it than meets the eye. That something “more” is really the stirring of just about every productivity method or hack you’ve ever heard of (and even those you don’t know exist yet). Quite a statement. So I wrote this book to illustrate precisely that. Now WorkFlowy goes a step further than the regular old outliner. It gives us Zoom-ability. Zoomability makes WorkFlowy what it is. Without being able to zoom in on a bullet point or list, WorkFlowy would not be WorkFlowy. Zoom gives us razor-sharp focus… zoom brings us Zen. The kind of Zen that makes you want to write and plan… and cry tears of joy. Really. It takes a bit of figuring out to finally click what one can actually do with WorkFlowy. I’m going to show you a ton of things you haven’t figured out yet - and perhaps you’ll reciprocate one of these days. That would be nice, because there are things I haven’t figured out yet. I’m sure of it. I’m going back to the start I have a private English student who’s a Rock Star here in Brazil. No kidding. Not only does he perform on stage as the lead singer of Rocca Vegas, but he also manages his own company, promoting events for some of the top bands in Brazil. He’s a family man, does Stand Up Paddle Surfing… and a bazillion other things regular people like you and I do. So… we were talking about apps that he could use to organize his life. I showed him a bunch of well-known, flashy apps that are no doubt coding wonders in themselves - beautiful to behold… then I took him for a quick spin within my WorkFlowy account, after which he enthusiastically exclaimed, “I’m convinced!” He then inquired, “Does it come set up like that?”. I responded dramatically with a few taps of the keyboard, ”No. You start like this…” and waited for his response: Home > Meet your brain > WorkFlowy - where have you been all my life? He seemed a little puzzled. So I explained further: “It’s a 100% manual setup. How you build your system depends on what you bring to the table.” I then proceeded to briefly run him through WorkFlowy’s core features… and I touched on The Pomodoro Technique, a bit of GTD, Personal Kanban, and the “Don’t break the chain!” hack.