Distinguishing information from tasks; or Tri-state bullets (blank/incomplete/complete)
Answered
Hello, I'm new to workflowy, considering moving my main todo/notes here from my previous solution in onenote.
However, there's one feature that I use very very extensively in onenote that I'm wondering if there is some kind of equivalent for in workflowy. All suggestions welcome!
Basically in onenote, bullets or any text are by default "plain text". Pressing ctrl-1 then adds an "unchecked box" to the line or paragraph containing the cursor, and pressing ctrl-1 again switches it to a "checked box". (pressing it a third time clears the box turning it back into a plain line of text.)
This is extremely handy for spontaneously distinguishing "information" and "task". Additionally, these act like tags so I can quickly search for marked-but-uncompleted lines of text to generate a todo list from all the tasks scattered about my document.
It feels like workflowy could support this case very well, but I'm not sure of a good strategy for approaching it!
How do you distinguish between a bullet which is information, vs a bullet which is a task?
Thanks!
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Thanks! As an example, I'd be looking to do something like this:
- Project A
- Info
- Info
[] Action item
- Feature
- Description
[] Task 1
[] Task 2
- Task idea 3
- Task idea 4
- Task group
[√] Task 5
[] Task 6
- Task idea 7
[] Task 8Later on I search for "unfinished tasks [ ]" and get:
- Project A
[] Action item
- Feature
[] Task 1
[] Task 2
- Task group
[] Task 6
[] Task 8The most straightforward thing that comes to mind is adding #t to any item which is a task but that seems kind of noisy... I'm also not sure if this would work with multiselect at all, the way completing tasks does.
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You can Sort of do what you describe.
I suggest you take a look at this blog post.
You can then search for "-is:complete" (note the "-") for uncompleted tasks and complete them with CTRL-ENTER
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Tagging is the solution.
- Every bullet can be completed (and struck-thru) via Ctrl+Enter
- Toggle completed visibility with Ctrl+O.
- Click on your task tag to quickly filter
"Noisy" is in the eye of the beholder. Personally, I would find having both a bullet AND a checkbox to be "noisy" (the checkbox can't replace the bullet... it's needed for zoom) I actually have multiple tags (GTD-like contexts, @home, @desk etc) and those denote "task" to me. In my world, tags aren't noisy, they are primary WorkFlowy tools. ymmv.
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@rawbytz
You have a good point about the "Noisiness"
A potential solution would be to have a "checkbox-bullet" and to need to right-click on the check box to check and uncheck it, but to left-click on the bullet to zoom in.
What do you think? is it viable as a solution? is the right-click too confusing?
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@rawbytz
> I actually have multiple tags (GTD-like contexts, @home, @desk etc) and those denote "task" to me.
That's a really good way of looking at it. Thanks for the suggestions!
Overall I agree, I'm not arguing against noisy per-se, just broadly looking for ways to adapt to a workflowy-workflow. Rethinking how I describe a task like that is great. :D
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Sorry to necro this, but I realized a very simple solution would be if you could put tags on shortcuts. If for example alt+1 through alt+0 were "toggle tag on current line" and in your settings (or right from the shortcut screen!) you could configure the tag name toggled by it, then it would be blazing fast to go through and promote a bunch of items to tasks or whatnot.
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