Workflowy: Simple and Awesome Organization

I'm a huge productivity app nerd and always keep my ear to the ground for new ways to keep my work organized and efficient. I live and die by Evernote and Wunderlist and both of those have been keeping me afloat for a while. Then my wife @meganmarie122 informed me of a new app to check out. Workflowy.

Honestly, I wasn't initially impressed upon my first scan of the application. It looked...well...too simple. It didn't look any different than just creating an outline inside of a Word document. Then I dove into the application more and saw it's cool features and benefits.

For Brainstorming

This is probably where I'll find the most use of Workflowy. We always have brainstorming meetings and most of my notes are high level ideas that turn into chicken scratch in my handy dandy spiral notebook. Chicken scratch notes aren't always bad...but organizing those thoughts to make sense of later can be tricky. I've always circled between Evernote and a Google Doc to keep those ideas archived in a somewhat lucid form. This is where Workflowy comes into play.

Workflowy allows you jot down high level ideas first. Then break those ideas down into smaller pieces, which can be broken down into even smaller pieces. In addition, you can drag ideas around the page and even share those thoughts via an email to other people. For me, this will save a huge amount of time since I typically have to type up a new document to share brainstorming notes with teammates in other offices.

Task Lists

This also has a great task list feature. Have ideas broken down into stages? You can cross those ideas off of your list as you accomplish the smaller parts of your big picture task. You can also organize your lists and make things more "findable" by tagging lines with #hashtags or other tags to keep a huge list of things together easier. In addition, each high level task or idea set can be collapsed to where only one piece of the whole Workflowy sheet can be focused and/or shared at a time. Pretty sweet.

The video below gives a good overview of how the application works. I can't wait to try it out in future brainstorming meetings as we plan things for client 2012 planning.

Have any of you used the app? What other productivity tools do you love?