Good Will Blogging
How do you like them apples...

After Metalab made collaboration with non-members free, it suddenly became feasible to use Flow as both my main GTD system in anger, and as a team management tool. I signed up for $10/month and have been using it for the past couple of weeks.

All I can say is “wow.” I never expected it to be so good. It’s very subtle, but there is something about Flow that makes it the first really successful GTD system I’ve ever had.

I have used many many GTD apps in the past, with varying degrees of success, but the most important thing about maintaining a GTD system is to keep it up-to-date and fresh. The problem with all the iPhone apps I have used until now is the lack of a strong desktop solution.

It doesn’t matter how good the iPhone app is, when I’m at my desk processing email, stopping to capture an action in my iPhone is too disruptive to the workflow, so it doesn’t happen.

I’ve tried apps that also have a desktop companion product, like Things and OmniFocus, but they are Mac-only which means I can’t use them at work. And to be honest, both are pretty terrible desktop apps.

So the first and biggest benefit of Flow is that the web app looks and feels like a desktop app, but I can use it exactly the same way on Mac or Windows.

I don’t know what is taking the Cultured Code guys so long to implement cloud sync for Things — judging from their blog they seem to be really over-thinking and over- engineering it. OmniFocus had a reasonably good cloud sync over 2 years ago, and Metalab seem to have perfected it in Flow.

Flow’s sync has all the properties you would want in a cloud-based sync solution: it’s fast, automatic, and reliable.

And man is it fast! It happens in the background in the iPhone app, so you probably wouldn’t even notice if it was slow, but it is usually finished in a few seconds.

I don’t know for sure, but it seems they have achieved this by making the sync incremental in such a way that it doesn’t need to sync its entire database every time, just the particular list or task that you are viewing.

I have sat in meetings with people in my team, and assigned a task to them on my iPhone, and a few seconds later it shows up on their iPhone. There is a palpable sense of transfer of responsibility when I do that, which has made a noticeable difference to productivity.

Flow has a very simple, bare-bones approach to GTD — in fact, it is not specific to GTD at all. They even renamed “projects” to “lists” to erase any trace of the app imposing a particular methodology on the user. I am a GTD guy, and it works perfectly as a GTD app.

I think the only “pure” GTD feature missing is the “tickler”, which was implemented in Things as “scheduled tasks.” But, to be honest, even as a GTD purist, the tickler is too often an invitation to procrastinate. I don’t miss it.

As I’ve noted before, sometimes just changing my GTD system is enough to motivate a period of great effectiveness, so I must acknowledge that this could be just another case of “a change is as good as a holiday.” We’ll see.

So Metalab, the people behind Flow, have just announced free collaboration with non-members.

Metalab:

Today, we’re making it even easier to collaborate with anyone in your life. From now on, when you delegate a task to someone who hasn’t signed up, they’ll receive a personalized link to the task instead of a generic invitation to Flow. They can respond to comments, complete tasks, and view all of the tasks they’ve been assigned—all without signing up. And best of all, it’s totally free.

This is the key change that makes is possible to seriously consider moving to Flow permanently. Now, I don’t have to worry about the huge cost to have my whole team on Flow. Even if I am the only paying member, I can still use it to delegate tasks to them and get their updates. (That’s all I really need for my own purposes.)

In fact, it might even be better. I’ve found that Flow can be a little too promiscuous when it comes to sharing lists with collaborators. If you add a person (who is fully signed up) as a collaborator to a list/project, tasks you add for yourself appear to the collaborator as a task for them. Effectively, they are everyone’s tasks. A couple of times already, someone else has marked as completed a task that I was planning to work on myself. It seems that when you have others collaborating on a list/project, you have to explicitly delegate to yourself if you don’t want them to work on it.

Although they are still ahead in terms of some features, I think Things has some catching up to do here. They have a Mac version, but Flow has the edge in that their desktop (web) app works anywhere. That is a huge advantage if you want to access your task lists from home and work, especially if you are forced to use Windows at work. To be honest, although it is a little slow, the Flow web app is actually ahead of Things for Mac in terms of UI & UX in my opinion.

As soon as I went back to Things I immediately noticed probably the most compelling thing about Flow as a personal GTD system: the ability to use it on the desktop (via the web UI) at work (Windows). It was jarring to have to suddenly go back to picking up my iPhone while processing email in the morning just to enter an action item.

I realised that with Flow, I’ve got a desktop app on both Windows and Mac, an iPhone app, and I can also use it on iPad if I want, all cloud-synced, and I don’t have to worry about the company firewall. That’s actually pretty compelling.

So this morning I decided to just sign up for myself, on the month-by-month plan, to evaluate it for a few months as my personal GTD system. I’ll also tell my teammates that if they choose to join me, to let me add them to my account so we get the volume discount if enough do.

This is an experiment, which is why this post is titled “Update 1” — I’ll be back with the results in a few months.

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.