Notes and todos are different animals

Two things arrive during a meeting and they are not the same shape.

“Call the vendor tomorrow at two.” This has a deadline, it belongs to a future moment, and it needs to find you when that moment arrives. It should leave your machine — into Microsoft To Do, onto your phone, into the notification that interrupts you at 13:55.

“The vendor’s contract auto-renews in March.” This has no deadline. It is not a task. It is a fact you will want in your hands at some unpredictable point, possibly in March, possibly the next time somebody says the word “vendor”. It should stay put and be findable.

Push the second one into a task manager and you get a todo that is never done, sitting in a list, being ignored a little more each week until you stop reading the list. Keep the first one as a note and it does not find you, which was the entire job.

The switch, and why it is Tab

Jot’s overlay opens in one mode and Tab toggles to the other. A pill in the corner shows which one you are in — amber for todo, clay for note.

Tab was chosen because it is the key your hands are already on, and because in this context it has no competing meaning. There is nothing to tab between on a surface with one input. The key was free, so it took the one decision the surface genuinely needs.

The alternative designs were both worse. A pair of buttons requires aiming. A guess — infer the type from the text — is the kind of cleverness that is right eighty percent of the time and therefore silently wrong on one capture in five, with no signal that it happened.

Which mode the overlay opens in is a setting, because it is genuinely personal. Some people capture mostly tasks. Some mostly facts. Getting the common case for free and paying one keystroke for the other is right either way round.

What the modes actually change

Not much, which is deliberate.

A todo has a status, can be completed, can carry a due time and a reminder, and is eligible for sync to Microsoft To Do.

A note has none of that. It is text with tags, findable by search, sitting in the notes section.

Both are rows in the same table with the same columns, and both are full-text indexed from the moment they are written. The mode is a field, not a different data model.

That matters because it keeps every capture equal in the ways that count. A note is not second-class storage. It is not “the place things go when you did not decide”. It is captured, indexed and durable on exactly the same terms.

Why the destination differs

Only todos go to Microsoft To Do, and the asymmetry is not laziness.

Microsoft To Do is a task manager. Pushing reference material into it produces a list where nine items are things to do and forty are things to know, and the useful nine become invisible. That is not a Jot problem, it is what happens to any task list used as a filing cabinet.

Notes stay local, findable by search over everything you have ever typed. The right destination for a fact is a place you can search, not a place that nags.

The tag does double duty

The first tag in a capture also picks its destination — the list in Microsoft To Do for a todo, the folder for a note.

This is one of the few places in the product where one input has two effects, and it earns it. In practice people tag by area — #work, #house, #admin — and areas are exactly what their lists are named after. Asking for both separately would mean typing the same word twice in slightly different syntax.

The explicit >list token exists for when they genuinely differ. Last one wins, because someone who typed two was correcting the first.

The stack, which came out of watching this

The overlay is not one capture at a time. Enter adds the current line to a stack and clears the input; Ctrl+Enter saves everything and dismisses.

That shape came from the observation that thoughts arrive in clusters. You do not remember one thing during a meeting, you remember three, and they arrive together in about eight seconds. A one-capture-per-summon design means pressing the hotkey three times and watching the window animate in and out three times.

The stack costs nothing to the single-capture case — Enter then Ctrl+Enter, or just Ctrl+Enter — and makes the burst case feel like typing a list, which is what it is.

Each item in the stack keeps its own mode, so a burst can be two todos and a note. Which is what a real burst usually is.

Jot is a quick-capture app for Windows: one hotkey, one line, back to what you were doing. What it is, or what is still unproven.