I’m happy to announce the first step toward date support in WorkFlowy. Today, we’re releasing the ability to quickly add dates to WorkFlowy, and to search for them. This lets people easily and quickly do the most basic date related functionality, and sets the foundation for the things we’ll be working on next, like reminders, snoozing, sorting, recurring and more.

1. How turn on dates

Dates in WorkFlowy is still in an experimental feature, and we’d love your feedback on it. To try it out, just go to settings and turn on two features: “Dates” and “Search Helper”. If you’re using an app, like the desktop app or a mobile app, you may need to a) install the new version of the app and 2) log out and back in again, before you see the new options in your settings.

2. How to add dates

WorkFlowy is a text-first interface, and we wanted dates to let you work similarly. Thus, we’ve made it so that all you need to do to add a date to WorkFlowy, is type it.

You can type a normal date like “Dec 25, 2019” (or lots of other formats)* and it’ll recognize it, and you can add times. Or (and this is what I’m personally using much more), you can use shortcuts like, “now”, “today”, “tomorrow”, “next week”, “last week”, “two months from now” etc. and it’ll prompt you to confirm that you want to turn this into a date (you can just ignore and keep typing if you don’t want a date).

Combined with a similarly smart and simple search support, dates in WorkFlowy become pretty powerful.

3. How to search for dates

Our new search helper should help you You can search for a day, a month, a year, or a date range, and it will recognize it. It will also recognize the searches “This

4. Date ranges We support ranges of dates both in content and in search. This is helpful in a lot of contexts, like research and project planning. 5. Mobile support It works on mobile, too, but the interface is a little different.

6. What’s this useful for?

Here are the primary use cases we thought about when designing this feature:

Adding future dates to tasks and projects, then finding nodes relevant to executing and planning Quickly adding the current date when journaling or taking live notes Doing research that includes dates and complex timelines (to better support this use case, we’re thinking about adding the ability to search for dates in any text you’ve pasted in, even those you don’t explicitly make into dates. Please let us know if this is important to you).

7. To-do

We have a team member dedicated to building out dates. After ironing out issues with basic entry and search, the next features we plan to focus on are snoozing and reminders, but please let us know what your priorities are so we can factor them in.

Reminders for dates you’ve set pushed to your phone and email

Recurring dates

Snoozing items until a certain date

Sort by date (and other things)

Do stuff when you click on a date (give you choices to search for related dates and turn on the features like reminders and zooning)

Ways to add dates with a mouse

Calendar sync?

8. Send us your feedback!

We’re releasing this as an experimental feature, we know this is a somewhat different implementation of dates than most tools (more typing, less clicking). There’s still a lot to do (reminders for example), but we’d really love to hear your thoughts. After you try it, leave your feedback either in: 1) comments on this post or 2) an email to help@workflowy.com.

* Note: We’re using a month/day/year format by default, and haven’t added day/month/year used in much of the world. We’re sorry, we wanted to add this but it added a bunch of complexity we weren’t ready to take on yet. If you aren’t in the US, we recommend using a year/month/day format, and we hope to be able to let people choose their own format sometime soon.