I’ll admit to jumping on the bandwagon of pretty much any product that has a promo video by @lonelysandwich. I also have a GTD/to-do app addiction, so when I saw this video for Flow by Metalab, it was a forgone conclusion that I would sign up.
What interested me most about Flow is its collaborative nature. Right from the promo video, they are very clear that collaboration with others is the primary benefit of Flow. I was also impressed by their web application. No need to install a desktop app, no worries about whether it’s Mac-only or Windows-only.
I sent the link to a few people in my team at work, and everyone signed up. (I think they thought they had to, because I’m their boss… hmmm.) Anyway, I started assigning tasks to them and inviting them as “followers” to some of the projects I created.
As a GTD/to-do app, it’s not bad. It uses tags, exactly like Things — which I’m now convinced is the future for all apps that help you organise lists. It has projects and folders, it automatically clears away completed tasks after a day, etc. Not quite as feature-complete as Things, but the fundamentals of a GTD app are there and they are solid.
But wow — the collaborative features elevate the experience almost to what you might call “Social GTD”. Each task allows a thread of comments, which steps almost into the realm of a bug tracker (in fact, it would make a pretty decent bug tracker). It’s actually kind of fun to organise projects and pass them back and forth between members of the team.
It is also very useful to have the iPhone app, which syncs with the cloud over the air, for use in meetings. A couple of times, I was in a meeting with the Business and was able to send a task to a member of my team as it came up. Pretty cool.
But it’s not all paradise. (At least not yet.)
First, there’s the price. USD $9.99/month or $99/year, with volume discounts that go down to 50% for a team of 10 or more. Now, I do believe in paying a fair price for quality services, and a hundred bucks a year isn’t that much money, so I could see maybe spending that for myself, if it had some features that made it significantly better than Things or OmniFocus for personal use. Right now, it does not.
The problem is that Flow’s main selling point is its collaboration features. So to make it worthwhile, you would have to get all the people in your team to become paying members. Assuming your company doesn’t pay, you either fork over hundreds of dollars yourself, or somehow persuade everyone you work with to pay $100/year out of their own pockets.
Second, there’s the apps themselves. Both the web app and iPhone app are attractive — the web app in particular is pixelicious — but not quite there in terms of usability and performance. The web app often has a big lag before a click takes effect, and switching views can take up to a few seconds, even with small lists. The iPhone app is functional and pretty, but syncing is slow (and often has to be initiated manually), and there are no push notifications so you have to rely on email or checking the app repeatedly for updates.
In conclusion, I think Flow has made a good start here, but the price point is too hard to get on board with a whole team, even giving them the benefit of the doubt that the functionality will improve in the future. I will definitely keep watching them to see how they evolve, but for now I’ll be migrating back to Things and hoping against hope for their cloud sync to arrive.
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