Lists
What a list holds and leaves out, what its note is for, why a list and a date never change each other, and why deleting a list keeps its tasks.
A list is where a task belongs. Work, Home, a client, a project you are in the middle of - whatever grouping means something to you.
That is the whole feature. A list has an emoji, a name and a short note. There are no sub-lists, no statuses, no workflows and no permissions, because none of those help a person decide what to do next.
A list's note
Under a list's name is room for a note: what the list is for, and how its tasks should be handled. "Client work for Acme. Every task gets a duration." Assistants see it whenever they look up your lists.
A note holds up to 500 characters, so it stays a few lines you can read at a glance. Detail about one task belongs in that task's own note.
Lists and dates are separate axes
This is the one thing worth being precise about.
A list says where a task belongs. Its date says when it surfaces. Neither touches the other: rescheduling a task never changes its list, and moving a task between lists never changes its date.
So a task filed under Work still appears in Today on the day it is scheduled for, and it is still in Work while it sits there. You are not choosing between organising by project and organising by day - you get both, because they are different questions.
The corollary catches people out: the Inbox means undated, not unfiled. A task can belong to a list and still be sitting in your Inbox, because it has been filed but not yet given a day.
Working with lists
Lists live in the sidebar. Add one with the + beside the heading, and rename it or change its emoji from the menu on the row. Write its note on the list's page, under its name.
Tasks without a list are perfectly normal. Filing everything is not the goal; a list earns its place when you actually want to see that group of work on its own.
Deleting a list does not delete its tasks
Deleting a list unfiles every task in it. Nothing else about those tasks changes.
Dates are the other axis and are untouched: a task scheduled for Thursday still appears in Upcoming, and in Today when Thursday arrives. What you lose is the filing.
The app asks you to confirm for that reason. There is no undo, and rebuilding the grouping means creating a new list and moving the tasks into it one by one - or asking an assistant to do it, which is faster.
From an assistant
Through the MCP server, lists are view_lists and save_list. The first returns each list with its note in full; the second writes the note, whole. The Tools reference shows each one as served.
Filing happens on the task rather than the list: save_task takes a list, and passing null removes a task from its list without touching its date.
No tool deletes a list. A list can only be deleted in the app.
Next: Tasks for what a task holds, or Scheduling for the other axis.