A Scratch Pad for Every List

Not everything in your head is a task.

You're planning a trip and you remember the rental place needs 48 hours notice. You're mid-way through a project list and you think of a better way to sequence the whole thing. You paste a tracking number somewhere because you'll need it later. None of those are checkbox items. Turning them into tasks just clutters the list with things that can never be completed.

So they end up somewhere else — a sticky note, a text message to yourself, a tab you're afraid to close.

Every list now has a place for them. Click Notes and a panel slides in from the right: one plain textarea, full height of the page, saving as you type.

How it works

There are two ways in, both on the list page:

• The Notes button in the toolbar, next to Share
• The slim Notes tab on the right edge of the screen

Either one slides the panel open. Start typing. There's no Save button — a moment after you stop typing, it saves, and the header tells you it did. Press Esc or click outside the panel to close it. If you navigate away mid-sentence, the last thing you typed is saved on the way out.

Reopen the list tomorrow, next week, or on your phone, and the notes are exactly where you left them.

Deliberately plain text

No bold, no bullets, no headings, no formatting toolbar hovering over your words.

This is the same reasoning behind the rest of FreeTodoList: the fastest tool is the one that doesn't ask you to make decisions before you can use it. A rich text editor would have you choosing between heading sizes when what you actually wanted was to write down ask Dana about the deposit before you forgot it.

Plain text also means what you write stays yours in the most literal way. Select all, copy, paste it anywhere — an email, a document, a different app entirely — and it arrives intact, because it was never anything but characters.

Write it however you think. Dashes for a rough list. Blank lines between thoughts. A wall of text at 11pm. The pad doesn't have opinions.

What people use it for

A few patterns we expect, based on what people were already doing with list descriptions and with tasks that were never really tasks:

• Context that outlives the tasks. Door codes, account numbers, the name of the person you spoke to, the reason you decided to do it this way.
• The staging area. Half-formed ideas that aren't ready to become items. Some graduate into tasks later; most don't need to.
• Running notes. A move-out list where you're tracking what each room still needs. A recipe list with the substitutions you made last time.
• Links. The article, the listing, the confirmation page. Somewhere to put them that isn't a browser tab.
• The why. Six weeks from now, call the landlord is a mystery. The notes panel is where the explanation lives.

It travels with the list

Duplicate a list and the notes come with it. That makes a list you've set up carefully — tabs, tasks, and the notes explaining how it all works — into something you can copy and reuse for the next trip, the next launch, the next quarter.

A few things it deliberately doesn't do, at least for now: the notes stay off your printed lists, out of the Markdown and plain-text exports, and off read-only share links. The scratch pad is for you and anyone you've handed an editable list to — not for the version you hand to someone else.

Still free, still no account required

Like everything else here, the notes panel works whether or not you're signed in. Make a list without an account, open the pad, write in it — it's saved to that list, and if you sign up later, it comes with you along with everything else.

Open any list and look at the right edge. It's already there.

Got a thought about how you'd want to use it? Send us feedback — that's usually how these things get built.