ByDesign is pretty easy to get started with and having used Confluence, Notion, Monday, and Coda.io in the past, I can see the appeal of this product to the non-DIY crowd.

I’ve stumbled on a few misses, though, from what I can tell from my first few days. Let’s start with TABLES::
1. No formula builder for performing operations on one or more columns of data
2. Tags. If you create a column of type “Tag”, you’ll have ALL tags available in that column. Not just the ones related to the column name. This means that you might have a journal log table with mood check for energy, work, love, and creativity that allows you to put in a breed of dog if you’ve got tags for that elsewhere in your workspace. Huh?
3. A “Tag” column type is treated as a Single-Select field and there doesn’t seem to be any way of applying an array of tags to cell within a table row. For example, if you had a Reading List table, I can’t tag a book as both “History” and “Graphic Novel” in the same cell. Quite frustrating.

The other frustration I seem to be experiencing is that I journal 2x per day…once in the AM (intentions) and once in the PM (reflections). I’ve got different prompts for the AM vs. PM and can’t seem to figure out how to set up a template for each. The only thing I’ve been able to muster up so far is creating separate docs for each, then creating a duplicate before beginning my journal entry. After duplicating, I’m left in the original (template) and the duplicate is created with the same name but with “(Copy)” added to the file name. So now, my template is called “AM Journal Entry (Copy)”. The result is a friction-filled workflow.

I’m on the fence about whether to keep this or to commit to a DIY No-Code platform.