Streams & task detail

Turning on Streams & task detail gives your tasks statuses and types, adds two more views to the Tasks screen, and fills in the Streams tab. The switch is on Settings → Tasks.

Turning it back off hides all of that and destroys none of it. Your statuses stay defined, your streams stay written, and the list goes back to the simple checklist, a ring you tap. Streams stays on the menu with the switch off and says which switch fills it in. Turn it on again a month later and everything is where you left it.

Streams is on the menu everywhere: in the browser, on a phone's browser, and on the installed phone app. All three list the same rows under the same three views, and all three open a single stream onto its own page, with its writing, its tasks and its journal.

A status says where a task stands, and the words are yours. Settings → Tasks → Your statuses lists what you have under its four group headings, and opening one lets you rename it, recolour it from the palette, and write what it means. + Add status under a group adds one to that group. Open, Done and Cancel are built into the simple checklist, so those three recolour but keep their names.

Every status belongs to one of four groups, and those four are fixed because the rest of the app reads them.

Active

Being worked, or needs un-sticking.

Upcoming

Agreed to, not started.

Later

Deliberately set aside. Still on the list, behind everything upcoming in the Status view.

Closed

Finished, in any of its senses.

A status shows as a coloured word beside its task, and the colour is the status's own, so renaming or adding one can never break how a list reads. The ring beside a task only ever means open or done. Deleting a status asks where its tasks should go before it removes anything, so no task ends up with a status that no longer exists.

Clicking the status on a task opens the list of your statuses, and you can work it from the keyboard alone: type a few letters to narrow it, use the up and down arrows to move through what is left, and press Return to set the highlighted one. A status whose name starts with what you typed is the one you get, so d means Done rather than the first status that happens to contain a d.

The Streams tab is one row per stream, the same shape a task's row has. The row reads the status you declared in that status's colour, then the life area, then your own word for the kind of thing it is, then how much is open under it. A stream with nothing open says nothing in that last slot, so the number appears where there is something to count. The kind drops off the row while the list is sectioned by kind, since the heading above it has already said it.

Kind, Areas and Status above the list arrange the same streams three ways, the way the view names above Tasks do. Kind opens first. Under Status the sections follow the order your statuses are in, and under Areas they follow the order of your life areas, so a section of one can lead a section of ten. A kind has no order of its own to follow, so under Kind the biggest section comes first. A row drops whichever field the heading above it has already said, so the kind goes under Kind and the area goes under Areas, and the status stays on every row because it is the control that changes it. A kind you have no streams of gets no heading, and a list that is all one kind gets no headings at all. Every heading folds, and a folded section says how many streams are inside it and stays folded until you open it again. Streams you never gave a kind gather under General at the end, and the same slot reads No area or No status under the other two.

Making a stream takes a name, from New stream in the header or from the blank page's own prompt. A right-click on a computer, or a press and hold on a touch screen, opens the stream's own panel: its name, which you tap to rename it, its status, and a way through to its tasks. A task can become one too. On the Tasks page, right-click it on a computer or press and hold it in a phone's browser, and choose Make this a stream. It asks first, since the task leaves the list when it lands. It keeps its area, its dates and everything written against it, and anything that was a subtask of it becomes one of the stream's tasks. A meeting stays a meeting. The installed phone app does the same from the task's own sheet, where the question reads Make it a stream or Keep as a task.

A task filed under a stream says so wherever you meet it. Its row on Tasks reads the life area first, then the date, then the stream’s name, which is the order a journal entry’s row already uses. On a computer that name is a link to the stream’s page. The one place it is left off is that page itself, where the title above the tasks has already said it.

Closing a stream is a status change rather than a separate action, so a closed stream moves under Show closed and stays readable, with Back to open streams for the way out. The app offers no way to delete one. Tasks point at a stream by name, so removing one would unfile work rather than tidy it.

Clicking a stream's name opens its page. The top says where it stands, with its status, its life area, and a verdict on whether it is moving. That verdict reads Moving when something happened on it in the last two weeks, and Stalled since the day it last did when nothing has. A stream nothing has happened to yet gets no verdict, rather than an invented one.

Under that is the long-form text, which is the stream rather than a note attached to it. It is the same editor a document uses and it saves itself the same way, so History in the top corner reads back what the text said before. Write what the stream answers and what being done would mean into that text like anything else. Two separate fields held those two things until Aug 30 2026. Whatever you had written in them is the first paragraph of the text now, word for word.

Below the text are the tasks under this stream, then the writing against it, one after the other down a single column, neither section folded away. Finished tasks are the exception, kept behind Show finished under the open ones, which says how many there are and opens them. Each ends with a bar for adding to it, and a section with nothing in it is that bar alone rather than a heading over an empty space. What you add appears once. The new row joins its own list, and where that row is off the screen a copy of it shows above the bar you typed it into, so you can see it took. A journal update written here is an ordinary entry on your Journal and your Day. The Journal shows it under the stream's life area when you gave it none of its own, since the area is borrowed at reading time rather than written onto the entry. Documents filed under the stream fold away under Notes at the bottom.