Quick Add and natural dates

One box, one sentence. Todome pulls the date, the priority, the project and the rest out of what you typed, and keeps the words that were actually the task.

Press Q anywhere, or tap the + button. Type the task the way you would say it. As you type, each piece Todome recognises turns into a chip so you can see what it understood before you press Enter.

Nothing here is required. buy milk is a valid task. The syntax is there for the moments when you already know the date and priority and would rather not open four menus.

The symbols

TypeMeansExample
p1Priority 1 to 4fix the leak p1
!!!Priority, by count — ! is P4, !!!! is P1fix the leak !!!!
#projectFile it in a projectdraft invoice #work
@labelAdd a label — any numbercall bank @errands @money
+nameAssign it to a teammatereview PR +priya
Note: If you type two projects, the first one wins — a task lives in exactly one project. Labels are different: every @label in the sentence is kept.

Dates and times

Dates are read from ordinary English rather than a format. All of these work: tomorrow, next Monday, on the 15th, this evening, in two weeks, Friday at 5pm, 25 Dec.

Ambiguous dates resolve forwards. Typing Monday on a Tuesday means next Monday, not the one that has already gone — the common case for a task is a date that has not happened yet.

Deadlines

A date introduced by by, due by or deadline is stored as the deadline instead of the due date. So file GST return tomorrow by the 20th gives you a task to work on tomorrow against a deadline of the 20th — two dates from one sentence.

Repeating

Recurrence is read before anything else, so the days come from the repeat rule and not from the date parser.

TypeRepeats
every dayDaily
every weekdayMonday to Friday
every MondayThat weekday, weekly
every Monday and ThursdayBoth weekdays, weekly
every other FridayFortnightly — also second, third, fourth
every 3 daysAny interval of days, weeks or months
every week / month / yearThe obvious thing

A bare time alongside a repeat sets the time only. standup every weekday at 9am repeats Monday to Friday at nine — it does not also pin the task to today.

The quieter ones

TypeSets
2h, 90m, 1h 30m, for 45 minHow long it should take
remind me 30 minutes beforeA reminder offset — also hours or days
at the clinic, in ChennaiA location

Location is read from whatever is left at the very end, once the date, duration and everything else have been taken out. That is why meet Anand at 5pm at the clinic gets the time from the first at and the place from the second. in only counts as a location when the next word is capitalised, so in progress stays part of the title.

What becomes the title

Everything Todome did not claim. call the supplier tomorrow 5pm p1 #work @calls leaves a task titled call the supplier, dated tomorrow at 17:00, priority 1, in Work, labelled calls.

Tip: Read the chips before you press Enter. If a chip is wrong — a date it misread, a label you did not mean — it is far quicker to edit the sentence than to fix the task afterwards.

When you would rather speak

  • Voice capture takes one spoken sentence, in any of eleven Indian languages, and runs it through this same parser.
  • Brain Dump takes everything at once and splits it into separate tasks.