Lists: your people, grouped the way your life actually works
Your contact list is alphabetical. Your life is not.
The people you'd text about a Sunday hike are nowhere near each other in your phone. Neither are the eleven people you send a holiday card to every December. Neither are the six who show up for book club, or the handful you'd actually call to help move a couch. They're scattered between your dentist, your landlord, and a guy named Aaron you met once.
That's what Lists fix. A list is a group of your people that exists because your life says it exists, not because a letter of the alphabet put them together.
Groups your life already has
You already keep these lists. They're just not written down anywhere.
Book club. Work. College. Neighbors. Babysitters. The group chat that never dies. The people you'd invite to a backyard thing on short notice.
In YourPond a list is a name and the people in it. That's the whole idea. Nothing to configure, no rules to write. You make one called #BookClub, you put six people in it, and now that group exists somewhere other than your head.
Each list carries its own color, so you can pick one out at a glance instead of reading every row.
The part that isn't a folder
Here's where a list stops being organization and starts being useful.
A folder is somewhere things sit. A list in YourPond is something you act on, right from the list on iPhone. The group is the unit of work, so the thing you'd do for one person, you can do for six at once:
- Tag someone into a list in a couple of taps. Open a person, pick the lists they belong to. Or go the other way and add several people to a list at once, without opening a single profile.
- Start a Moment for the whole list. Book club met on Thursday? Create the Moment and pull in all six attendees from the list instead of typing six names.
- Set reminders across a group. Everyone from the old team, once a quarter. The holiday card list, every November.
That last one is the difference between a contact app and a relationship one. Knowing who is in your book club is trivia. Being reminded to actually see them is the point.
A person can be in as many lists as they are in your life
People don't sit in one box, and lists don't ask them to. Wren is in #BookClub and #College. Your sister is in #Family, #EmergencyContacts, and probably #WeddingGuests. Nobody has to pick.
This matters more than it sounds. The rigid version of this feature, one person in one category, is why most contact organizing gets abandoned in week two. Real relationships overlap. The tool has to let them.
Tags you can act on
A list shows up as a hashtag on the people in it. Open Wren and you see #BookClub and #College right on her profile, the same place her relationships live. Tap one and you land on that list, everyone in it in one place.
They work like tags in the ways that count. You make them up as you go, a person is in as many as your life puts them in, and they read as #Hashtags wherever they appear. When you want the group, you filter your people by a list and there they are - the six in #BookClub, the eleven you send a card to - without scrolling past your dentist to find them.
Where a list goes further than a tag is that you can point things at it. A reminder can belong to #BookClub, not just to one person in it. A tag labels someone. A list is a real thing your reminders and your plans can hold onto, which is why "every November, the holiday card list" is a thing you can actually set.
Lists are free
Lists are on the free tier, for everyone, on web and on iPhone. You don't need a plan to group your own people.
How to start
Don't build twenty lists. Build the one you'd actually use this month.
Think about the last time you wanted to reach a group rather than a person. The dinner you almost organized. The card list you rebuilt from scratch again. The friends from a city you left. Make that one list and put the people in it. The next time that group comes up, it's already there.
Lists are one part of everything YourPond does to keep the people you care about close. The rest of it works better when your people are grouped the way you actually think about them.