Trash and archive

Todowl separates “I am finished with this” from “I want this gone”. They are different intentions, so they have different destinations, and only one of them has a clock on it.

The archive

The archive holds projects, lists and tasks you want out of sight while keeping them. Nothing in the archive expires. It sits there until you restore it.

Archive a project by right clicking it in the sidebar. Lists and tasks can be archived from their own menus.

This is the correct home for a finished project. You keep the record of what you did, and your sidebar stops carrying last quarter’s work.

The trash

The trash is where deleted things go, and it has a countdown. Anything you delete stays for 30 days and is then removed automatically.

The trash screen shows each item with:

• what kind it is, project, list or task
• where it came from
• what it contains, for example a project with its lists and tasks
• when it was deleted
• how many days are left

You can filter by kind when you are looking for something specific in a busy trash.

Restoring

Select an item and choose Restore. If it took children with it when it was deleted, they come back together, so restoring a project rebuilds its lists and tasks rather than leaving you with an empty shell.

If the original location no longer exists, for example the project a task lived in was itself deleted and purged, Todowl restores the item into a sensible place and tells you where it put it. You get your work back rather than an error.

Deleting for good

Delete permanently removes a single item immediately and cannot be undone. Empty trash does the same for everything in it at once. Both ask for confirmation first and name what is about to go.

Which one should I use

• Finished a project and might want to look at it again: archive
• Created something by mistake: trash
• Cancelled a task rather than completing it: neither, mark it won’t do, which keeps it in the record with a cross instead of a tick

The 30 day clock

The clock starts at the moment of deletion, not at the moment you look at the trash. Moving an archived item to the trash starts that countdown from then, which is the intended way to retire something in two steps: archive it now, decide later.