The "already jotted" warning - catching duplicates without asking you to search first

A common failure in any capture system is the duplicate. You write “renew the domain” on Monday, forget you did, and write “renew the domain before it expires” on Wednesday. Now there are two todos for one task. Tick one and the other stays, nagging, until you realise.

The obvious fix is “search before you capture”. Nobody does that, and they are right not to: searching first costs exactly the attention capture is meant to save.

So Jot does the checking for you, in the box, while you type.

What it does

As you type, Jot compares the line with what you have already captured. If something matches, a quiet line appears under the box: Already jotted, the existing title, and a hint that Ctrl + ↓ will show it. You can:

• Ignore it and save anyway, if they are genuinely different.
• Stop, because you now know it is already there.

Nothing is blocked. The warning is information, not a gate.

Why warn instead of merge

Automatic merging is tempting and wrong. “Call Sam” and “Call Sam about the invoice” might be the same task or two different calls. Only you know. A tool that silently merges them will eventually lose something. A tool that asks every time becomes a dialog you click through without reading. A quiet line you can ignore is the middle ground.

Why it lives in the box

The moment you are about to create the duplicate is the only moment the warning is useful. A weekly “possible duplicates” report would arrive too late and feel like homework. Putting it in the capture box keeps the cost close to zero: you see it in the same glance as your own text.

Keeping it fast

The capture box has a strict speed budget, described in the hundred-millisecond budget, so the check is deliberately simple. It waits until you pause typing for about a third of a second, so it never fires mid-word. It ignores lines shorter than six characters, so a fragment does not match half your list. And the match itself is plain: case-insensitive, and it trips when either title contains the other, which catches the shorter re-phrasing of something you already wrote.

Pairs with the peek

The other half of “do I already have this?” is Ctrl + ↓ in the capture box, which peeks at today’s todos and your last capture without opening the app. Together they cover the two common questions - “did I already write this?” and “what is on my plate today?” - without leaving what you are doing. More in today is the landing screen.

What it does not do

• It does not look at deleted items.
• It does not run in the Meeting tab, where repeated lines are normal.
• It does not understand meaning. “Phone Sam” and “call Sam” will not match. That is a deliberate trade for speed and predictability.
• It does not use AI or send anything anywhere. The comparison runs locally against your own database.

The general idea

Good capture design moves work out of the moment of capture and into the background, or into a later, calmer moment. Checking for duplicates is one more job the tool can do so you do not have to. For the opposite philosophy - ask before acting - see AI that asks before it acts.

Jot is on the Microsoft Store.

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.