Released: Thursday, July 9, 2026
The outliner is your thinking surface
The outliner is where you go to hold two things at once: the nitty-gritty detail of what actually needs to happen, and the big picture of where it all fits. Your thoughts about the real world are rarely tidy on the first pass — they arrive out of order, in the wrong place, half-formed. So the surface you think on has to get out of your way.
Every bit of friction between having a thought and giving it a home is a tax on your thinking — reaching for the mouse, scrolling to find the right spot, losing your place, hesitating because you’re not sure you can undo it. This release is about removing that tax. Arrange and rearrange freely, build the structure a problem needs as you come to understand it, and then apply lenses — filter, action buckets, time blocking — that surface only what matters right now so you can act. Capture the mess, think your way to clarity, then get it done, with as little between you and the thought as we can manage.
Here’s what that unlocks.
What you can do now
Move any idea anywhere — without losing your place
Ideas end up in the wrong branch all the time. Now you can move them to the right one in a couple of keystrokes. Press ⌘/ (Ctrl+/ on Windows) on any task to open Move to…, then pick any parent in your entire outline — even one that’s scrolled off-screen or living in a completely different tree. Start typing to search your whole outline for the right home; leave the box empty and hit Enter to promote the task straight to the top level.
It works even when you’re zoomed all the way into a single branch (Focus In). You no longer have to zoom back out, find the destination, and drag — you stay in the flow of the thought you’re having and send the task where it belongs. And because the whole move is a normal editor step, ⌘Z puts it right back. You can rearrange fearlessly.
Filter to a slice — and keep working inside it
Press ⌘⇧F (or the new Filter button in the toolbar) and your outline collapses to just the tasks that match — matches highlighted, surrounding context gently dimmed for orientation, with a live count so you know the size of what you’re looking at. Already searching with ⌘F? A “Filter to these ⇥” chip turns your find into a filter in one press.
The important part isn’t the finding — it’s what you can do once you’re there. This is a filtered view you can keep working inside: move tasks, reorder them, refile them, refine them. It’s a workspace, not just a search result. When you’re done, Esc restores exactly the view you had before, collapse state and all. This is how a filter becomes a genuine lens for thinking — narrow to a slice of your world, manage it fully, then step back out.
Keep the detail without cluttering the picture
Not everything belongs in a task title. The context, the link, the “why,” the two lines you’ll need when you finally sit down to do it — those are notes. Press Shift+Enter on any task in the outliner and an inline note panel opens right there (Workflowy muscle memory, if you have it). Write freely; it saves when you move on. A subtle icon marks the tasks that carry a note, so your outline stays clean and scannable while the depth is a keystroke away whenever you want it.
Rearrange fearlessly — everything is reversible
Thinking out loud only works if you can take it back. So the outliner now remembers:
- Complete and cancel are reliably undoable — ⌘Z un-checks a task you just finished or brings back one you just cancelled (and reactivates it). Completed tasks now linger, still checked, until your next refresh, so you can undo a mistaken check with nothing lost.
- ⌘⇧↑ / ⌘⇧↓ jumps a task straight to the top or bottom of its siblings, carrying its whole subtree, without ever popping it out to a different level.
- Ctrl+T cycles a line’s type — task, project, folder, note — and now works in every Quick Add surface, not just the outliner, so the muscle memory carries everywhere you capture.
Native text navigation is back
Because you live in the outliner with a live cursor, the everyday text motions have to feel native. ⌘← / ⌘→ are back to jumping to the start and end of a line (and selecting to the line edge) the way they should. Folding a branch moved to ⌘. (toggle) and ⌘⇧. (toggle all) — free chords that don’t fight your typing, and familiar if you use Obsidian.
How this helps you level up
MakeTimeFlow exists to connect your daily actions to the life you’re actually trying to build — not to be one more list you feel behind on. That only works if the place where you think can keep up with your thinking. When you can capture a raw idea, move it to where it belongs, break it down, note the detail, and then filter to just the next actionable slice — all with almost nothing between you and the thought, all reversible — the outliner stops being a place you maintain and becomes a place you think. Structure stops being something you get right up front and becomes something you discover as you go. That low-friction fluidity, joined to the actionable lenses that surface what matters right now, is what turns a pile of intentions into a coherent way of living well.
What’s next
We’re continuing to sharpen the lenses — more ways to slice your outline by the things that actually drive your day, and tighter connections between what you’re thinking about and what you’ve committed your time to. Keep the ideas coming; they shape what we build next.