When something looks wrong

The things that confuse people, answered plainly.

"A checklist item tells me to filter by Critical Items in the upper right"

This note is wrong, and you can ignore it. Evening Preparations contains a row reading "Double check critical items — Filter by Critical Items in the upper right ☝️". There is no Critical control in the upper right; the filter lives at ••• → Filter → Critical Items.

More importantly, the app has already done this for you. The Travel tab opens with a Double Check panel listing exactly those items, each with its own confirm tick. Tick the note off and use the panel. See Travel day and the Double Check.

"I checked something and it disappeared"

Working as intended. Hide Completed is the default, so a checked row shows its tick for about a second and then leaves, which keeps the list shrinking as you work.

To get it back: ••• → Show Completed, find it, uncheck it. There's no undo.

If this keeps catching you out, leave Show Completed on permanently — checked items stay put, struck through, and gather under a COMPLETED heading at the foot of each section.

"A whole section vanished"

You checked its last item, so it collapsed into the COMPLETED SECTIONS 3 of 8 row at the bottom of the phase. Tap that row to see them. Nothing was deleted.

"The button said Go Pack but I landed on Travel"

Genuinely misleading. The final button of trip creation says Go Pack, but the app opens the phase that matches today's date — Prep if you're a few days out, Pack the day before, Travel on the day itself. If you made a trip departing today, you land on Travel.

Nothing is wrong. Tap Pack in the tab bar.

"I picked six lists and got sixteen"

Genuinely under-explained. Alongside your choices, every trip automatically receives eleven sections that aren't shown in the picker: Travel Prep, Home, Evening Preparations, On You, Departure Sequence, Unpacking, Activities and Notes to Self.

They're the ones essentially every trip needs. Remove any you don't want with Manage Sections.

"The same item is in two places"

Deliberate. Your driver's license belongs in Wallet & Docs and in On You, so it appears in both, each captioned Also in ….

They're linked: checking one checks the other, and editing one edits both. Deleting one deletes only that copy.

Items from kits are the exception — they don't link, because sunscreen in the Beach Kit and sunscreen in the Hiking Kit are two bottles.

"I typed '3 phone chargers' and there's no 3"

Genuinely confusing, and half of it is a real limitation.

The quantity was stored. But only Items display a quantity badge, and Prep, Plans and Return create new entries as To-Dos, which never show one. Open the row's editor and change its type to Item if you need the number visible.

The other half: a leading number breaks the library search, so "3 phone chargers" matches nothing and offers to create a duplicate instead of finding the charger you already have. Type the name first, pick the match, then set the number.

"The Return tab is full of questions I can't answer"

These sections no longer ship. What Didn't Work, What Worked Well and For Next Time left the library — they're waiting on a proper journaling feature rather than being prompts pretending to be packing rows. A new trip won't have them.

If you already wrote in one, it stays. Nothing was taken off your existing trips. So if you're reading this because they're on a trip of yours, here's how they work: they're made of prompts — "What did you pack but didn't use?", "Successful packing choices" — rendered as ordinary rows with checkboxes and no obvious place to write.

There is a place to write. Press and hold the row, choose Edit Item, and type into the note field. Your answer then sits under the prompt on that trip, and it's there in Past Trips when you plan the next one.

One prompt still carries a typo: "What's broke or needs replacing?" should read "broken".

For Next Time is empty. No prompts at all — a blank section for whatever you want to carry into the next trip.

"Red sections look like something's broken"

They're not. Section colors are identity, not status — Wallet & Docs and On You just happen to be red in the shipped library. Nothing is wrong, nothing needs attention.

You can recolor any section: Settings → Sections & Kits Library → the section → Color.

"I changed something in my library and my trip didn't update"

The most important rule in the app, and it's deliberate.

Your library is a cookbook; a trip is a meal you cooked from it. When a trip is made it takes its own copy of everything, and from then on it's self-contained. Library edits — and template edits — reach the next trip you make, never the ones you already have.

The same protection works in your favor: deleting a library item can never damage, empty or break a trip that used it.

Templates don't have that protection, because a template holds your library items themselves rather than copies. Delete an item from your library and it leaves every template that used it — you're told how many before you confirm.

"My T-shirt count went down on its own"

You planned a specific shirt into an outfit on the Plans tab, so one of the generic shirts is now spoken for and came off the count. Your total is unchanged — it's T-shirt ×2 plus the one you named, instead of T-shirt ×3. Delete the named one and the count goes back up.

This only happens in Tops, Bottoms, Outerwear, Lounge Clothes and Shoes. Basics and Accessories never decrement — a specific pair of underwear you planned is an extra, not a replacement for your daily count. See Planning outfits.

"A garment I typed into an outfit is loose at the bottom of Clothes"

The app didn't recognize the name, so it didn't guess. It's still on your list and it still counts — it just has no type group. That's the deliberate trade: a confident wrong answer buries a shirt somewhere you won't look for it, and a quiet miss leaves it in plain sight. Brand names used as the whole name ("Birkenstocks") and non-garments ("sunglasses") are the usual causes.

"I can't drag this item into another section"

Drags are clamped to the section they start in; you'll see a "no drop" badge if you wander out and the row will spring back. To move an item between sections, open its editor and change its Section there.

"I ticked a garment on Plans and it didn't check off on Pack"

Right. On the Plans tab, ticking a garment under an outfit means "I've worn this" — it's a different mark from packing, and neither one touches the other.

"Prep disappeared and Return showed up"

The tab bar carries four phases at a time, so Prep and Return trade places the day after your return date. ••• → Phases reaches all five whenever you want.

"The app didn't remind me"

It never will. There are no notifications, reminders or alerts of any kind — not a setting you've missed. If you need to be prompted to start packing, set an alarm the way you normally would.

"The Reset screen says it will delete all my trips"

A genuinely misleading label. The gray note under both buttons on the Reset Options screen describes deleting trips, but that only applies to Delete All Trip History. Reset Libraries to Defaults does not touch your trips — they keep their own copies.

Trust the confirmation dialog that appears when you tap, not the gray note.

"I made a mistake — how do I undo it?"

You can't. There is no undo anywhere in the app, and no export.

The practical protections:

• Deletes that matter ask first — sections, trips, templates, library items. Packing-list items are the exception, deliberately, because speed matters more there.
• Archiving beats deleting for sections, items and templates. It's reversible.
• A template is independent of the trip it came from. Change or delete that trip and the template is unaffected. It is not independent of your libraries, though: Reset Libraries to Defaults deletes your templates along with everything else in them.

Still stuck?

If the app is doing something these pages don't describe, the docs are wrong rather than you. The glossary may help if it's a labeling question, and How the app is organized explains the rules that most surprises come from.