Using Mainline

Capture

The home screen is one big box. Type a thought and save it, or tap the mic and say it. It saves instantly and works offline. Captures live on the device and sync up the moment you're back online. Capture is deliberately dumb: no deciding, no sorting, just get it out of your head.

Inbox & clarifying

Everything you capture lands in the Inbox as raw text, waiting to be decided. Clarifying asks one question first: is it actionable? If yes, it becomes a next action (verb-first, with a context, and an optional under-two-minutes flag), a project (an outcome plus its first action), or a waiting-for (whose court the ball is in). If no, it goes to Someday, Reference, or the trash.

Nothing in Mainline has a due date, on purpose. When something genuinely has to happen on a particular day, open it in Next and tap Calendar… to get a prefilled Google Calendar link or an .ics file for Apple, Outlook and the rest. Then you can take it off the list. You already have a calendar; dated things belong there, where you actually look for them.

Next actions & contexts

Next holds everything you could actually do, grouped by context: where you are or what you need to hand. Check things off as you go. From Next you can open Contexts to add, rename or archive your own; make them match your real life rather than a template.

Projects

A project is any outcome that needs more than one action. Each one lists its actions as a checklist with a progress count, and you can add the next action inline without leaving the page. Projects with no next action are flagged as stalled. That flag is the single most useful signal in the app.

Waiting

Anything you've handed to someone else sits here, oldest first, with its age showing. That's your nudge list: when something has been waiting too long, you chase it. Without this list, delegated work quietly disappears.

Someday & resurfacing

Someday is for things you might do one day but aren't committing to now. Nothing here is lost. Set a resurface date on a Someday item, or on an action, and it hides until that day, then reappears in your Inbox to be decided again.

Someday items, projects and actions all take a free-text note for longer thinking. When a Someday item's note has outgrown it, promote it to a project in one tap and the note comes along.

Reference

Reference answers “where did I put that?”. Each entry is a note to yourself about where something is kept: “Dyson warranty: in Gmail, search Dyson”, “Lease: blue folder in the hall cupboard”. You can add a link, tie it to a project, and search the lot. Mainline doesn't hold the documents themselves; it holds where you left them.

Horizons

Four editable notes (Purpose, Vision, Goals, Areas of Focus) sitting above your daily lists. You won't touch them most weeks. They exist so that once a month you can check whether the projects you're actually running are the ones that matter.

The weekly review

Review walks you through a guided pass: empty every inbox (Mainline's, your email, the pile of paper on your desk), make sure every project has a next action, check what you're waiting on, and scan Someday. Mainline tracks when you last reviewed and nudges you after a week. The first review of each month adds a Horizons step so you check your projects against your Purpose, Vision, Goals and Areas.

Finding everything

The bar along the bottom (or the row along the top, on a big screen) holds what you touch daily: Capture, Inbox, Next, Projects, Waiting and Review. Someday, Reference, Horizons and your Contexts live one tap deeper, under More.

Good habits

• Capture the moment you think of it. Never trust yourself to remember.
• Clarify the Inbox to zero regularly. An inbox that never empties stops meaning anything.
• Do the weekly review. It's what makes the lists trustworthy.
• Keep dated things on your calendar, not in your lists.

Everything syncs across your signed-in devices automatically, and anything that feels destructive gives you a ten-second undo, so you can move fast without being careful.