Anatomy
Phase 2 — Framing
┌────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ ✓ Stud partitions, level 3 │
│ ✓ Fire-rated board to risers │
│ ✓ Door frames │
│ + Add a task… (form)│ ← in place, context inherited
└────────────────────────────────────────┘
↑ Enter creates and stays focused
Four rules, and the second is the one that makes it a different pattern from a small form:
- In place. The field sits where the record will appear, so the position answers questions the form would have asked.
- Enter creates and stays. The field clears and keeps focus, so five items is five lines of typing.
- Escape cancels cleanly.
- An escape hatch to the full form, for the one in twenty that needs more.
Why it works
It removes the context switch, which is most of the cost of adding something. A form is not slow because of typing; it is slow because you leave what you were doing, and then have to get back.
The staying-focused behaviour is what turns it from a convenience into a capture tool. When adding the second item costs nothing, people enter things as they think of them rather than batching — and things that get batched get forgotten.
Inheriting context is the quiet part. An item typed into the Framing group is a Framing task; nothing has to ask which group, because the person already said it by where they typed.
Getting it wrong
- A field that loses focus after each add, which makes the second item as expensive as the first and defeats the pattern.
- Discarding typed text on blur. Someone types half a task, gets interrupted, clicks away, and it is gone.
- A quick add that opens a modal. That is a form with a smaller button.
- Silent failure, where the row appears and then vanishes with no message — see optimistic update.
- No escape hatch, so the occasional richer item forces a trip elsewhere anyway.
- Quick add on something with consequences. A stray Enter should never send, charge or notify anyone.
Exemplars
Linear's issue creation from the board puts the field in the column, so the status is set by where you typed and never asked.
Todoist and Things built their whole capture model on this: one field, Enter, still focused. The result is that people actually record tasks at the moment they occur rather than later.
Google Calendar's click-a-slot is the same idea in two dimensions — the time is set by where you clicked, and the only thing left to type is the title.
The extractable rule: quick add is a capture tool, not a shortened form. If adding the second item is not almost free, the pattern has not been built.