Lists

Lists are the smallest thing in Jootle that’s still useful by itself.

A list is what it sounds like: a named collection of items. The items can be checked off, the list can be sorted, and you can attach a list to anything that benefits from one (a project, a contact, an idea, a goal, or nothing at all).

This sounds basic. It is. The reason lists get their own chapter is that they end up everywhere once you notice them, and the small details about how they work are worth knowing.

What a list looks like

A list has a name and a set of items. Each item has its own text, an optional note, and a checked / unchecked state. Lists can also have a category, which groups them in the UI. Common categories include todo, shopping, reading, packing, groceries, inventory, wishlist, questions, but the field is free-form. Whatever word you use, your AI will use the same word back.

You can have as many lists as you want. There’s no soft limit. People who use Jootle daily end up with thirty or forty active lists; that’s normal.

Creating, adding, checking

You don’t need to learn UI gestures. Most list work happens through conversation.

You: Start a packing list for the beach trip. Sunscreen, paperbacks, the good speaker, the swimsuit Lily likes, and a tide chart.

Your AI: Created the Beach trip — packing list with those five items.

Later:

You: Mark the sunscreen and tide chart as done.

Your AI: Done. Three items still open: paperbacks, the good speaker, swimsuit.

You can also click items checked or unchecked directly in the Lists view, if that’s faster for you. Either way, your AI sees the change.

Attaching a list to something

A list on its own is useful. A list attached to a project, contact, or idea is more useful, because it shows up in that workspace and gets the right context.

You: Attach the Beach trip — packing list to the Beach Trip 2026 project.

Your AI: Attached. You’ll see it under the project’s Lists tab.

Things lists commonly attach to:

Projects. Every project has a Lists tab. Action items, decisions to make, files to gather.
Contacts. A list of things to remember when you next speak to a specific person.
Ideas. Lists are part of how an idea grows. (See Ideas.)
Goals. A list of recurring sub-tasks the goal should hit on each cycle.
Programs. Operational checklists for an ongoing area of work.

A list can be attached to more than one thing if you want. Detaching it doesn’t delete the list.

When to use a list vs. a project

This trips people up early on, because some lists are big and start to feel like projects.

The dividing line: a list is items. A project is items plus all the surrounding context (people, files, decisions, dates, status, chat history).

If you find yourself adding lots of side notes to a list, asking your AI to “remember why we decided this”, or attaching files to the list, the work has graduated. Ask your AI to convert it: “Make this list into a project.” Your existing items become tasks under the new project.

The other direction works too. If a project’s tasks have all converged into a simple checklist, you can extract that and let the project close. Tell your AI; it’ll do the housekeeping.

Categories and filtering

Categories help once you have a lot of lists.

You: Show me my shopping lists.

Your AI: You have three: Groceries (weekly), Hardware store, Kid stuff.

You: What’s left to do this week?

Your AI: [shows unchecked items across all todo-category lists]

You don’t have to be religious about categories. Lists work without them. They’re a convenience for filtering, not a requirement.

Standing lists vs. one-off lists

A common pattern:

Standing lists persist forever. You uncheck items, re-check them, add new ones. A weekly groceries list. A daily to-do. The list itself is the recurring container.

One-off lists are about a specific thing and stop being useful when that thing’s done. A packing list for one trip. A pre-launch checklist. Once the trip is over, the list is done.

Treat one-offs as disposable. Don’t carry empty checked-off packing lists for last year’s three trips. Ask your AI to archive (or delete) them. The point isn’t to be tidy for its own sake; it’s that having one current beach-trip packing list is more useful than having four old ones with one current one mixed in.

Bulk operations

The kinds of operations you’d expect, in plain language:

“Move all the open items on the kitchen punch list to the renovation project.”
“Combine these three lists into one shopping list.”
“Sort the reading list by date added, most recent first.”
“Convert the unchecked items on the morning checklist into tasks under the household program, due daily.”

The bulk operations the UI doesn’t yet expose (like cross-list deduplication of items) are something to ask your AI for; it’ll handle them through the conversational interface.

When lists are the wrong tool

Sometimes the thing you’re about to make is not really a list:

“Track every conversation I’ve ever had with Mike” is closer to a contact-scoped history view than a list.
“Track our family’s spending by category” is closer to a Finance toolkit view.
“Track everything we tried with the kitchen, with notes on what worked” is closer to a project’s decision log.

Lists are good at “things that can be checked off”. They’re less good at “complex objects with relationships”. When you find yourself wanting fields beyond text-and-checkbox, that’s a hint to look for a different toolkit or to upgrade to a project.

A small but important note on language

Your AI tries to use whatever you call the list. If you say “the grocery list”, that becomes its name. If you later say “the shopping list”, and you have both a Groceries list and a Hardware Store list, your AI will ask which one you mean. Be glad it asks. The alternative is items appearing on the wrong list, which is a small annoyance that compounds.