I'm building a browser extension that puts your three lanes on the new-tab page. Open a tab, see today's list. No URL typing, no re-finding the bookmark. The web app stays available for everyone — the extension just removes one friction step for people who live in the browser.
The single biggest gap in the current Today's Tasks experience is that you have to remember to come back. The web app has no notification, no email, no reminder — by design, since those are the things that turn a calm tool into a noisy one. But that means every visit requires you to actively decide to open the URL, find the bookmark, or search "todays tasks" in your address bar.
A new-tab extension solves this without adding noise. Every time you'd open a new tab anyway — at the start of the day, between meetings, after closing a Slack thread — you'd see today's list. Nothing intrusive, nothing pinging you. Just your three lanes, where you'd naturally look anyway.
If you mostly work inside a browser (and most knowledge work today does), this is probably the version of Today's Tasks you actually want.
Same model as the web app — three priority lanes, one input, automatic midnight reset, local-only data. The extension is a thin shell over the existing app, not a separate product with separate sync logic.
Open a new tab and immediately see High Priority, Due Today, and General. No URL typing, no bookmark hunting, no app-switching.
Identical structure to the web app, including the midnight reset that clears stale items. Nothing new to learn.
Tasks live in browser storage. No sync to my servers, no account, no telemetry on your task content. Same privacy stance as the web app.
To keep expectations realistic, here's what the extension is not:
The most common feature request the web app gets is "make it sync between my laptop and my phone." It is the right request — most knowledge workers actually do switch devices — but sync is not the answer I'm going to ship, and the new-tab extension is what I'm shipping instead. The reasoning has three steps.
Step one: sync requires accounts, and accounts kill the five-second open. The whole product proposition is "no signup." The moment I add login I have to add password reset, account deletion, GDPR data export, two-factor recovery, and a server that has uptime obligations. That's a real product with real ops; it's also the moment Today's Tasks stops being the small thing I can keep maintaining alongside everything else.
Step two: when I actually watch how I use the app, I switch devices far less often than I switch tabs. I open ten tabs an hour, but I only really need my list in two contexts: at my laptop in the morning, and on my phone occasionally when I'm walking somewhere and remember a thing. The mobile case is solved by the existing responsive web app — open the URL on your phone, add the task, it'll be there next time you open it on that phone. Sync between the two would be nice. A new-tab extension that surfaces the list every time I open a tab on my main machine would actually be transformative.
Step three: if I'm wrong about that, the extension teaches me cheaply. I can ship it, see whether the friction drop changes how people use the list, and decide based on actual signal whether device-sync is worth the operational weight. If it turns out the new-tab placement is enough — and I suspect for most people it will be — I save myself building a server I'd then be on the hook for.
"A few months" is vague on purpose — I have a day job and this is the side project. But concretely the bar for shipping is:
storage only. No tabs, no history, no host permissions. The Chrome Web Store reviewer's checklist matters here, and so does your peace of mind.If you want a heads-up the day the extension is in the Chrome Web Store, the email box at the top of this page is where to leave your address. I'll send one email when it ships and that's it — no drip campaign, no "thanks for signing up!" auto-reply.
The web app already works well as a daily list — most of what the extension adds is removing one click from the workflow.