Writing things down

There’s one text box. Type whatever is on your mind and send it, without picking a list, a label or a date first. Your words are saved before anything reads them. If sorting gets something wrong, or you’re offline, the task is still there in your own words and search still finds it.

Several things at once

With a subscription, you can write several things in one go:

pick up dog food, call the dentist about thursday, and the smoke detector in the hall is beeping again

That becomes three tasks. Maitland only splits where the next part is clearly its own task, usually because it starts with a verb, and it never changes your words. “laundry, return library books, call mom” becomes three tasks. “milk, eggs, bread” stays as one, since there are no verbs, and so does “buy milk and the eggs for mom.” When it isn’t sure, it keeps everything together.

If you dictate, what you say is always kept as one task. The speech recognizer adds its own commas and periods, so Maitland doesn’t split on them.

Dates and times

Maitland reads a date or a time when your words are clear, like “by friday,” “tuesday at 5” or “invoice due fri 5pm.” When they aren’t, it leaves the date empty and shows your phrase in gray at the bottom of the card.

“run at 7:30” could be morning or evening, so no time gets set. Adding am or pm fixes that, and so does “tonight,” “morning” or a meal, as in “dinner at 7.” A bare 10 or 11 is read as morning, 12 as noon, and 1 through 5 as afternoon. If you write “next friday” on a Thursday, it could mean either of two days, so both show up under the phrase and you tap the right one. Maitland also leaves things undated when they already happened, when they’re a shop’s hours, or when the time belongs to something else, like “notes from the 2pm.”

An event is something with a start and an end, like an appointment. It doesn’t get a tick square. Write both times (“dentist 3 to 4”) or name something at a time without a verb (“dentist at 3”), which makes a 30-minute event. If the line starts with a verb, as in “call the dentist at 3,” you get a task with a time instead. Diary-style lines with the times first work too, like “10:30 - 11:00 today - Lookback.”

Write “every tuesday” or “every 2 weeks” and the task repeats. When you tick it off, it moves to its next date.

A label’s name, or one of its words, puts a task under that label, so “laundry” goes under home. To put something in a list directly, start with the list’s name and a colon, as in “Garden: plant the bulbs.”

Reminders

To get a reminder, write “remind me” in a task, which needs a subscription, or tap the bell at the bottom of its card, which doesn’t.

pay rent friday remind me

dentist oct 12 remind me a day before

“nudge me,” “ping me” and “don’t let me forget” work too, as do “in 20 minutes,” “an hour before” and “the morning of.” “tonight” means 7pm, and “at lunchtime” means noon.

A reminder needs a date. If you give a day without a time, it comes at the hour your day starts, which you set in Settings → Calendar. When the time is unclear, as in “remind me tomorrow at 9,” Maitland sets the date and skips the reminder, and you can add it with the bell.

Reminders only arrive on the iPhone, and they never pass through Maitland’s servers. If you set one on the web, your iPhone picks it up the next time it syncs. Your iPhone asks to send notifications the first time you set a reminder.

Siri and the share sheet

You can say “Take this in Maitland” to Siri, or share a file from another app to Maitland. There’s no way to add things by email or from a web service, because Maitland’s servers can’t read your account.

How sorting works

Sorting happens on your iPhone. Maitland’s own rules go first, and Apple’s on-device model works out whatever the rules can’t. Nothing you write goes to an AI service. On the web, your browser uses the same rules and your iPhone finishes the job when it next syncs. If your iPhone can’t run Apple’s model, Settings → General → SORTING tells you why, and Maitland sticks to its rules.

It learns from the changes you make. Take a label off a task and the list forgets the word that put it there. Add one and the list picks up that task’s words. If you change a task’s length the same way twice, Maitland remembers the word for next time. Anything it learned can be deleted in Settings → Labels.