My favorite new productivity tool (and it’s free)

The last couple emails, I talked about the dangers of distraction. It seemed pretty appropriate to end the week with a cool productivity tool that, at least for me, helps me ward off distraction.

See, I’m a big lists guy. I like to make lists.

It could just be my daily todo list… or it could be me planning out an entire course for the Lab. I do it with simple bulleted lists.

A tool that I long used was Workflowy. Workflowy is a web app that specializes in nested lists. For quite while, I would be inside Workflowy almost every day. At any given time, one of my Chrome tabs was Workflowy.

But, I become annoyed with it over time. Just stupidly simple things they would never fix. It was like the developers of Workflowy just decided “Nope, we hear you with your feature requests but we don’t really care.”

Namely…

• The Workflowy app on the phone was stupidly limited. I mean, you couldn’t even delete a list item. You had to remove all the characters one by one by backspacing. Ridiculous.
• You couldn’t make bullet items bigger, change colors
• Couldn’t assign due date

I could go on.

So, I went shoppin’ around. Ironically, it was in a comment on the Workflowy blog that I found a competitor. The comment was from another frustrated user of Workflowy who said he got tired of their lack of anything and moved.

The tool he mentioned was Dynalist.

Now, just to be clear… this is not an affiliate link. In fact, while they have a Pro version, you can do damn near everything you want for free. I just wanted to make that clear here since I know these Daily emails are new and I didn’t want you to think I intend to turn these into a pitch fest for stuff to buy. I don’t. OK, movin’ on…)

Dynalist is freakin’ epic. It does everything Workflowy does not. Like….

• Changing the formatting of bullet items.
• Multiple lists, multiple documents. Not one big honker document like Workflowy
• Date deadlines (that can integrate with Google Calendar if you have the Pro version)
• Ability to embed images, links, etc.

If you like to plan things out with lists, I think you will love Dyanlist.

If you have been using Workflowy, you can find out what you’ve been missing out on.

Dynalist now replaces Workflowy fully for me. I use it every single day. I’m planning all kinds of projects for BMA in there, planning out content. In fact, I’m currently planning out a coming MAJOR update to the Email Followup Enginetraining for my Lab members.

Oh, and since it is a web app, your data is accessible from everywhere. And yes, their web app blows the snot off what Workflowy had.

So… Workflowy. It’s been real. But, I’m moving on. In some breakups, you’re supposed to say “It’s not you, it’s me”. But, no… in this case, it is you, Workflowy. I found something better. Sorry.

Perhaps you’ll dig it, too. Check out Dynalist.

…

This brings to a close the first full week of The Daily. Which begs the question…

What do you think so far?

Let me know…

1. Hit reply on this email.
2. Smack this link and tell me right inside Facebook Messenger.

– David