Stop Sending Your Refined Checklists as Screenshots

Do the same job a few times and your checklist gets better. The supplies you forgot the first time get added, the confusing order gets fixed, and “when this happens, do that” lines pile up one by one.

But when you hand that checklist to someone else, things go oddly back to the start. You screenshot it and send it in a chat, or export a PDF and attach it to an email. The person on the other end reads it and copies it into their own tool. A line goes missing on the way, the steps flatten out, and the copied checklist keeps no record of how they actually ran it.

So we put mail inside fecit.

One mail = recipients → subject → message → attachments

Mail looks just like email.

• Recipients — your fecit friends, members of the same project, and members of the same guild. Up to 20 people per mail.
• Subject and message — a short note. You can leave them empty.
• Attachments — tasks and memos. A record of a run you did, or a template you’ve refined. Up to 10 per mail, or none at all.

There are two ways to write one. Start a new mail from your mailbox, or tap “Send” in the ⋯ menu (⋮ on desktop) of the document you want to share. The second way opens with that document already attached.

The recipient doesn’t copy anything

Open a received mail and each attachment has two buttons.

• Create now — for templates. One tap creates a task (or memo) of your own, steps and all. You can start running it the moment it arrives.
• Download — keeps a copy of the document as yours. A template becomes your template, so you can keep refining it yourself.

Want to see what it is before taking it? Tap the attachment. It shows a preview on the same paper layout as printing. Things that only mean something to the sender, like their labels or project, are left out.

Reply and forward work too. When you forward, the attachments go along, so the next person can take the same documents.

Organize your mailbox with folders

There’s an inbox and a sent box, and you can create your own folders under them, the same folders you already use for tasks and memos. Putting a mail in a folder doesn’t remove it from the inbox, so nothing gets lost while you tidy up.

You can color the star in front of each mail’s subject. The recipient picks this color, and only the recipient sees it. It’s your own marker, not an importance level set by the sender.

While building it — the day sending failed every time

When we first wired up mail, not a single mail would send. Even with no attachments.

The cause was one database index. It combined two fields of a mail, the attachment list and the recipient list, and both were lists. MongoDB can’t write a document into an index that combines two list fields (cannot index parallel arrays). An empty attachment list is still a list, so every mail hit it. Once we split the index, mail started flowing.

We fixed one small thing too. When a mail arrived, a red dot showed up on both the notification bell and the mail envelope. That’s the same news twice, so now the red dot shows only on the envelope. The notification list still keeps it as history.

Letting what you’ve refined flow between people

fecit is a tool that builds up your preparation so each run of the same work goes better than the last. Until now, most of what got built up stayed with one person. Mail is the shortest way to hand it to the person next to you. A checklist you refined over many runs becomes, for them, a starting point that’s already refined.

You’ll find the mailbox behind the envelope at the top left of the Me screen on mobile, and the envelope in the top bar on desktop.