Flow helps thousands of teams centralize communication and keep everyone in sync every day. It’s most useful when your team uses it for everything: from tracking to-dos to discussing goals and setting deadlines. Of course, using Flow for everything means you need robust ways to find what you’re looking for, quickly.

Lists and tags aim to help with just that, but sometimes nothing beats search. Flow has always been able to search your tasks, but today we’re launching a new and vastly improved search feature: it’s faster, more accurate, and now it even finds matching contacts, lists, and tags.

Did we mention faster? We shaved a full second off most searches, and the average search now takes less than a second. Zoom zoom.

But we didn’t stop there. The Quick Search popover now shows you any collaborators, lists, and tags that match your search words. It’s so cool we even made an animated gif:

Search is now an even better way to find that task you’re looking for, or to dig up and review older tasks related to a particular topic. The Quick Search popover puts you a single click away from searching not just open tasks, but every completed task in every one of your lists.

Want to see every task related to a particular initiative or client? No problem. Flow looks high and low—it indexes task titles, descriptions, comments, and tags—so it can easily turn up every task related to your search words. Boom.

We’re constantly improving Flow, both what you see and the behind the scenes. Not too long ago, we reduced the time it takes to load most lists by as much as 50%. And you might have noticed another recent improvement when viewing completed tasks: older tasks now load automatically as you scroll down.

Finally, we have a big announcement right around the corner (cough new iPhone app cough), so definitely stay tuned. Until then, we hope you like the new Flow search, and that it will save you some time this week!

The Flow Team

We’re lucky to work with a ton of talented people and it’s great to be able to show off their work. Last week, the newest version of Flow’s sister app, Ballpark was released to the masses and a landslide of compliments which we’re happy to add to.

If you haven’t come across it yet, Ballpark gives you everything you need to run a small business all from one app. You can send estimates, track your time, invoice your clients, and keep track of cash flow. You can even discuss invoices and estimates with your clients in app. 

Basically it does for your business what Flow does for your life—eliminates the little worries so you can focus on what’s important. Check it out and let us know what you think: http://getballpark.com.

Creating tasks with the Quick Task Bar has always been a breeze. It’s great for instantly capturing ideas and to-do lists, and it even takes cues from its context, like delegating to the selected collaborator, or adding a due date in the Today view.

But sometimes you want to add just a few more details: to invite a follower, say, or to add a couple tags. That’s always been possible in the full task form, but if you’re in the middle of adding tasks with the Quick Task Bar, switching could be a drag. That’s why, today, we’re introducing new details shortcuts for the Quick Task Bar:

The syntax might be recognizable from Flow’s email integration—you can use the same shortcuts in the subject line of an email to tasks@getflow.com. Here’s a quick rundown:

• @name Delegates the task to name
• +name Invites name to follow the task
• #tag Tags the task with tag
• !tomorrow Sets the task’s due date to tomorrow
• [Ship Repairs] Sets the task’s list to Ship Repairs

You can find some additional tips and tricks in our Support Centre, but before you go, we have another new feature to tell you about. Before today, drag & drop in the sidebar was limited to one list at a time. Now, you can select and drag multiple lists at once:

We hope you like these updates! Have a great week!

Our team creates tasks to keep track of everything we’re doing, so it’s not uncommon for some of us to end up with around 10+ tasks due on any given day. We love seeing everything we have to do and quickly jumping between discussions on each task. But we know firsthand that it’s sometimes not enough to see our Upcoming tasks sorted by day since some of today’s tasks are naturally more important or urgent than others.

That’s why, today, we’re pleased to announce that you can now reorder tasks in your Upcoming view:

Now you can easily plan and stay focused on a busy day by sorting your tasks in the Today view. The order you give a task in Upcoming is separate from its position in My Tasks or its list, so you have the flexibility to order your tasks logically according to each context.

One last tip: like in other lists, you can drag and drop Upcoming tasks between groups. Try rescheduling an overdue task by moving it onto a task due today!

We knew we were onto something when we introduced the Quick Task Bar last year. Since then, we’ve added another “quick bar” that makes inviting people to your lists simple and easy, right from the list sidebar.

Today we’re adding two new quick bars: the Today and task followers bars. The Today view of your Upcoming tasks now features the Quick Task Bar, so you can line up your day’s tasks as fast as you can type:

And task pages now have the same quick-invite bar we added to task lists, for inviting new followers in a jiffy:

We have a little bonus today, too: we’ve added “editing” indicators to comments, in much the same way that you can see when someone is typing a new comment. These should help with context when you’re having a fast-paced discussion with your collaborators:

We hope you enjoy these updates and the rest of your week!