This is the largest release we've had in Plot for a while: A brand new website, a new task list design, more controls to make your views more minimal, and a new founding team plan with a lot of perks (including a massive discount and direct access to me for support).

There's a lot of ground to cover today so let's dive right in.

Task List V2

Ever since I started Plot, my main goal has been to reduce the overwhelm while still being able to keep track of the stuff to be done.

The problem is that if you go too far in removing information, then the list is not really useful for team work. But if you add too much, it gets crowded very fast and makes you hate your life.

And so, the first version of the task list got us close to that sweet spot.

But had a few flaws: it was too dense. The controls were too hidden. And when you had a long list of tasks (like we all do, after a while) it became hard to digest. It felt a little too much like a spreadsheet.

So I went back to the drawing board.

How can I make the list feel like "just a list", but make it more calm? More manageable? Easier to understand at a glance?

The result is Tasks List v2:

Here's a designerd breakdown if you care about that sort of thing:

And the tasks capture experience is still unmatched. It feels like you're just jotting down a regular list in your favorite notes app (cough... Apple Notes... cough.)

It stays nice, clean and manageable while you're planning, and only adds buttons and controls when you actually need them. You can try it right now in your Plot account.

Property visibility controls

After we had this new beautiful list, I wanted to go farther. I wanted to make it so that if some property in a task was not relevant for you specifically, yes you who are reading this, you could hide it altogether.

So let's say your coworker Mark really likes adding tags to all tasks to keep things tidy.

But tags only give you anxiety and visual clutter. Well... now you can make the tags invisible only for you, without messing with Marks workflow over there.

Same with all the other controls and information we show on screen. This way, you can adapt your view and task controls to only show things that are relevant to you. You can manage the noise and reduce the anxiety on your to-do list.

This release, by the way, sets the stage for our top secret (lol) focus mode, coming soon.

New onboarding experience

Before we were onboarding you with a lot of tasks. The idea was to give you a feel of all the product could do but honestly it was a lot. So, true to my minimalism pursuit, we trimmed it down to the essentials.

This includes a new welcome video (that I regrettably recorded on the old UI, updates to follow...) and guidance on creating projects and teams... and that's it!

A more minimalistic UI

We've removed the labels on the top nav buttons (Filters and View Settings) and moved the main page title down in Tasks to make the UI a lot cleaner and less overwhelming. Work will continue to remove anything that's not needed so stay tuned.

New Founding Team special plan

As we gear up to full public release with all the bells and whistles, we are introducing a new Founding Team plan. If you decide to come aboard, you will have direct access to me, Plot's founder, via Slack.

You can DM me for direct support at any time (bet you can't do that with Asana's founder), get early access to new features, and help shape the future of Plot with priority feature requests.

You have a great idea on a feature that you desperately want? Ask away. To me. Directly.

Oh and I will also help you get set up with 1 on 1 onboarding, and give you a nice 40% off for your team's first year to help transition from your current platform.

You can get all the details of what's included in our pricing page.

Free trial reset

A lot changed in Plot during November. So, if you were on a Plot trial before, we've reset all trials so as soon as you log in again, you will have an extra 15 days to try the new version 🔥

Brand new website

And finally, to celebrate it all, we have a sparking new website.

My background is in web design, so I put a lot of love into this new version of the site. I also refreshed our branding and I'm very happy with how it all came together. Even added cool fades, noise, a retro style font for our headlines and a lot of trendy feature boxes. The designer in me is proud.

The site is live right now!

Bug fixes and improvements

• In our previous release we introduced real time collaboration in the text editor. In turn, that introduced some latency in opening up existing documents. In this release we fixed the issue and documents are back to being instant.
• Loading large views (1000s of tasks) could make render slow in some cases. We've rearchitected our rendering strategy and now it's buttery smooth, regardless of how many tasks you are viewing.
• We've fixed a bug on keyboard navigation that was preventing it to activate reliably, requiring several down arrow clicks before kicking in. Now it works as expected.
• Fixed a bug when using the command menu (⌘+k) where changing assignees from "My tasks" could throw an error.
• Fixed a bug that prevented "Trial expired" status to update correctly in some cases.
• Fixed small visual regression on Task filters (styling mostly)
• Fixed enter key causing duplicate entries in some cases in tasks.
• Fixed duplicate log entries when updating project statuses.
• Fixed board cards not focusing correctly in some cases when using the add task button.