4 ms·

You've inspired me to kick back into high gear with Anki, but this time focus it on my software career. I was a hardcore Anki freak back from 2008 to 2011 when

You've inspired me to kick back into high gear with Anki, but this time focus it on my software career. I was a hardcore Anki freak back from 2008 to 2011 when I used it to master Japanese. I found hacking on a lot of systems that my software career was going well enough, but lately after just having switched stack and feeling very behind where I ought to be my thoughts have been turning to Anki again. I've made a decision this year to stop building random projects and to start building my fundamental knowledge down to a scary deep level. So far I've gotten kind of distracted and started building a random project again (the perils of being a low-c individual), but this time I'm approaching the learning side of things different. Currently I'm using Workflowy to learn particular technologies. Outlining each technology starting with a particular template that breaks things into executive summary, concepts, components, installation, configuration, operation, debugging, questions, links. I'm finding this to be a fantastic way to over time flesh out a solid mental model and from there I want to Anki the shit out of the entire mental model. I'm definitely finding Workflowy to be a secret weapon for learning. At a glance I can see which branches of the tree are lacking detail, so that informs me how deep my mental model on a particular aspect of something goes and where I need to work on it. Anki is just ridiculous when you're committed. You feel truly unbeatable. It'll kick your ass but in the end you systematically claw your way to the top of the mountain.

Arubis 7y ago
This may be getting tangential, but I'm curious: what's the big sell for you with Workflowy vs. other similar outlining tools? I've personally shifted my outlining over into org-mode and it feels like I'm just a bare intermediate user there; wondering if there's functional advantages that Workflowy retains.
- james_s_tayler 7y ago
  For one thing, it was the first tool I discovered that just goes infinitely deep and I can zoom in an out. I was sold instantly. I haven't tried org-mode, but certainly in the year or so I've been using workflowy I've found the mobile app (I use Android) to be an excellent compliment to the web app and I've found the sharing features really handy too when I have a great node in the document I want to share in either a read-only or collaborative way. I've always got very easy access to it and the speed of navigation is fast. I recently took the time to learn the keyboard shortcuts. That was surprisingly quick, but I'm faster in it already. The search feature just works amazing I reckon. Especially in combination with using tags. Recently I've also taken to putting things in any node where they are relevant and not just in a single place, but the information will be housed in one node as a source of truth and the other nodes just link to that node as each node has a link that you can copy for internal linking within the document. I just love it. The whole thing just works for me. The only thing I really want as a built in feature is the ability to display images. I read on their blog you can do it by essentially using markdown image tags and a browser extension which parses them and inserts an <img> tag. I think that could be pretty sweet.

Arubis 7y ago

This may be getting tangential, but I'm curious: what's the big sell for you with Workflowy vs. other similar outlining tools? I've personally shifted my outlining over into org-mode and it feels like I'm just a bare intermediate user there; wondering if there's functional advantages that Workflowy retains.

james_s_tayler 7y ago
For one thing, it was the first tool I discovered that just goes infinitely deep and I can zoom in an out. I was sold instantly. I haven't tried org-mode, but certainly in the year or so I've been using workflowy I've found the mobile app (I use Android) to be an excellent compliment to the web app and I've found the sharing features really handy too when I have a great node in the document I want to share in either a read-only or collaborative way. I've always got very easy access to it and the speed of navigation is fast. I recently took the time to learn the keyboard shortcuts. That was surprisingly quick, but I'm faster in it already. The search feature just works amazing I reckon. Especially in combination with using tags. Recently I've also taken to putting things in any node where they are relevant and not just in a single place, but the information will be housed in one node as a source of truth and the other nodes just link to that node as each node has a link that you can copy for internal linking within the document. I just love it. The whole thing just works for me. The only thing I really want as a built in feature is the ability to display images. I read on their blog you can do it by essentially using markdown image tags and a browser extension which parses them and inserts an <img> tag. I think that could be pretty sweet.