Documents, panes and boards make Legend the most powerful productivity tool
“I’ve tried a lot of task management/productivity tools but Legend fits so well with my ideal workflow.” — Tom U.
There are sooo many different to-do apps and organisation tools out there, so what is it about Legend that makes it so powerful?
Before Legend, I struggled to maintain a task list. I tried many different options, but I would quickly get frustrated with the time spent on tidying up my lists to keep them current and organised.
But in Legend, once a workflow is set up, you get the most important items first and fastest — whether you have 20 tasks to get through or 10,000. You never have to spend time tidying up your list.
How do Documents, Panes and Boards work?
Before we get into a bit more depth, on a super high level, here is how it all fits together:
- Documents are where all your items are saved, your notes, to-dos, email tasks, all your information
- Panes are where you view your document or zoom in on parts of it by focusing on a particular project or using filters to sort your items
- Boards are where you organise your panes, use a single pane to take notes or create extensive workflows across multiple panes - you can save different workflows of panes in different boards to return to as you need.
What makes documents in Legend different?
A document on other apps/tools is a page of words arranged in lines, to be viewed, as you typed them, just like a normal notepad to-do list.
In Legend you record your tasks, notes and information as items on their own, collected together in a document, instead of part of a contiguous list (think of it as writing each item on its own post it note).
Your documents list your information, but it’s panes that give you the real power.
Pro-Tip: start with just one document, and create different children or nodes inside it. This allows you to search, sort and filter all your information more easily.
Powerful, pain-free pane usage.
Panes are the superstars of Legend. Each pane can be set to view a document in its entirety (similar to most note taking tools) or zoom into separate nodes or children of a document.
Panes can also be set with different filters, to sort through the information and only pull out the things that you want that pane to focus on.
For a few examples on how to use the filter system in your panes, check out this video on Youtube.
An example of your workflow could be:
- One pane with your whole document for taking notes, brainstorming projects/ideas, and reading over.
- A second pane set to view only items with a priority tag 🔴 🟠 🌕. With this you can see the items with priorities, clearly separated from your other items.
- Your last pane could be set to focus on a particular project in your document you are working on, keeping all your items for that project clearly displayed.
Other options include sorting by hashtag, or particular contacts, so you can find things that relate to people or topics.
There are so many ways you can use panes to arrange and sort your information: panes can be set to include tags, filter types or search terms — for more examples check out the filters video.
Arrange your panes and save your workflows with boards.
Finally, boards are the place where you organise your panes. Arranged from left to right and horizontally scrollable, you can add, customise and close boards to create workflows. Using different boards gives you the ability to store your workflows and revisit them later.
Perhaps you want a board for work and one for home (keep that work/life balance in check), or you have a workflow you want to use for developing leads and another for your HR records. Boards allow you to save different workflows, even if they are in the same document.
Insider Tip: Have you seen the ‘Powerful workflows for everyone’ example on the Legend home page? (About 75% down the page).
This is a great example of boards being used to arrange and save different workflows. It is a good example of how to use documents, panes and boards, while drafting these examples, I created 6 boards, but saved all data in one document, with each pane focusing on a different child using different view types and filter settings.
Next steps for your workflow
Start by creating using just one document - by creating too many documents you limit your ability to search or filter across all your projects. Open that first document in a single pane in one board. Make this your first stage of recording your notes.
For your next step, take a look at the examples listed on the homepage (shown just above), and make a new pane to experiment with a view types and filter settings.
For some basic shortcuts, check out the intro video, and the one on filters - there are a few hotkeys in there that make setting up a lot easier.
Lastly, if you want to get started with some quick note taking techniques, check out the medium articles on basic intro to bullet journalling here, and a really good looking 4 pane flow.
I hope this has been helpful! If you have any questions or want to see what other advanced users are setting up their workflows, check out our forum.
