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Show HN: TaskFlowy - I created a Workflowy clone that's better for tasks.

8 points by ryeguy_24 6y ago

ryeguy_24 6y ago
OP here. So, here was my big problem. I write endless hierarchical notes for endless meetings that I live through. They go like this: - New Client - Referred by John - Looking for a quote on X - Would like to chat next week to hear options? - *** Ryan (me) to create 3 slide presentation to highlight options and cost See that last one!? Yeah, that's a task/todo for me buried in notes. So, now I have little tasks that sit within my massive note taking document. It's not great for prioritizing or quickly trying to see what's urgent for today/this week. And then I hate copying that information to a separate todo list (computer science nerds just hate redundancy :). All these approaches break down fairly quickly. I believe that any note can also be a task but we shouldn't copy them to a separate list ("pass by reference" instead of "pass by value" for the computer geeks out there). These seems intuitive but haven't really seen this implemented anywhere. Does anyone else have this problem too? I spent the last weeks building this prototype. I think it achieves my goal but I'm still tweaking and building. I'd love for some feedback and to hear your thoughts on this problem/solution.
- cercatrova 6y ago
  Yes, my solution was to just use Markdown and bold the tasks so that I could see all of them in VSCode without losing context.
purplecats 6y ago
have you heard of taskpaper?
- ryeguy_24 6y ago
  Just took a look. Looks a lot like WorkFlowy or Dynalist but doesn’t have the same approach I’m going for where you can organize your todos and track them in a different view. I guess you can tag them but not sure if that helps managing your day. Have you used it and do you like it?
  - purplecats 6y ago
    yeah, you can filter just the tasks. i use it for the same goal purpose that your product aims to achieve, i believe. one benefit is that taskpaper supports extensibility, custom css, and if you wanted a feature like yours, you can just build upon it easily (which is what I've done). I build your tool but to work with taskpaper. If i didn't use taskpaper, I think your tool would be nice, so you're onto something here.
ctb9 6y ago
I really like this. I keep bouncing between text-based todo lists and more visual/kanban tools, so this feels like the best of both worlds. (If I could stand the airtable/notion database view those tools would be great, but alas.) One thing that's preventing me from dumping in a bunch of action items is that I can't figure out a way of creating tasks via the keyboard. Is this possible?
- ryeguy_24 6y ago
  I can definitely add that. Can we chat? I’d love to get more feedback and iterate if you’d like.

8 points by ryeguy_24 6y ago

OP here. So, here was my big problem. I write endless hierarchical notes for endless meetings that I live through. They go like this: - New Client - Referred by John - Looking for a quote on X - Would like to chat next week to hear options? - *** Ryan (me) to create 3 slide presentation to highlight options and cost See that last one!? Yeah, that's a task/todo for me buried in notes. So, now I have little tasks that sit within my massive note taking document. It's not great for prioritizing or quickly trying to see what's urgent for today/this week. And then I hate copying that information to a separate todo list (computer science nerds just hate redundancy :). All these approaches break down fairly quickly. I believe that any note can also be a task but we shouldn't copy them to a separate list ("pass by reference" instead of "pass by value" for the computer geeks out there). These seems intuitive but haven't really seen this implemented anywhere. Does anyone else have this problem too? I spent the last weeks building this prototype. I think it achieves my goal but I'm still tweaking and building. I'd love for some feedback and to hear your thoughts on this problem/solution.

cercatrova 6y ago
Yes, my solution was to just use Markdown and bold the tasks so that I could see all of them in VSCode without losing context.

purplecats 6y ago

have you heard of taskpaper?

ryeguy_24 6y ago
Just took a look. Looks a lot like WorkFlowy or Dynalist but doesn’t have the same approach I’m going for where you can organize your todos and track them in a different view. I guess you can tag them but not sure if that helps managing your day. Have you used it and do you like it?
- purplecats 6y ago
  yeah, you can filter just the tasks. i use it for the same goal purpose that your product aims to achieve, i believe. one benefit is that taskpaper supports extensibility, custom css, and if you wanted a feature like yours, you can just build upon it easily (which is what I've done). I build your tool but to work with taskpaper. If i didn't use taskpaper, I think your tool would be nice, so you're onto something here.

ctb9 6y ago

I really like this. I keep bouncing between text-based todo lists and more visual/kanban tools, so this feels like the best of both worlds. (If I could stand the airtable/notion database view those tools would be great, but alas.) One thing that's preventing me from dumping in a bunch of action items is that I can't figure out a way of creating tasks via the keyboard. Is this possible?

ryeguy_24 6y ago
I can definitely add that. Can we chat? I’d love to get more feedback and iterate if you’d like.