Being disorganized should be one of the seven deadly sins. Luckily there is a plethora of tools available that allow you to extend some order to the chaos and the newly launched YC-backed Workflowy is one of them. Hoping that Workflowy will eventually become like an external brain, founders Jesse Patel and Mike Turtzin have made the tool as easy to use as possible.
In the same listmaking space as Evernote and like a web-based Omni Outliner, Workflowy has a simple use case but one that a has a great many applications. The founders liken the usefulness of their product to a philosophical issue; “Almost everything you create on Google docs is a list.” True.
The first thing you see on Workflowy is a blank page, which might be intimidating to some. Founder Patel suggests initially separating your Workflowy list into Goals, Projects, Chores, Thoughts, and Links sublists and then digging deeper with its almost infinite capacity for subcategories.
Workflowy also lets you zoom, complete a task, hide completed items as well as expand, collapse and delete items extremely fast, allowing you to type notes at the speed of thought. It also works offline and synchs up as you reconnect to the Internet, providing you keep your browser window open.
In terms of future plans, founders Patel and Turtzin are prioritizing mobile (like a Workflowy iPhone app), search and collaboration tools and are currently working on changing the interface to make it more user friendly. They hope that the service, which they plan to monetize with a freemium model, will transform the way we organize our lives.