Running your week from the side panel
The list is not the problem — the scattering is
Most people do not need another to-do app. They already have four: a notes app, a calendar, a chat thread with themselves, and a stack of browser tabs standing in for “things I meant to read”. The difficulty was never writing tasks down. It is that the tasks, the reasons behind them, and the material they need all live in different buildings.
A side panel answers that precisely because it sits next to the work rather than instead of it.
Start by emptying your head, not by organising it
Say what is on your plate, in whatever order it falls out. The pile becomes todos, with dates and deadlines where you implied them, and the dated ones land on the calendar. What is left over as thinking stays as notes — beside the tasks, not in another application.
Reminders hang off the same dates. One calendar unions everything dated in a project: dated todos, plan bars, dated notebook entries and timed appointments. “What does this week actually look like” becomes one view instead of a reconstruction from four sources.
One project per real piece of work
A project binds to a Chrome window. Its chats, notes, todos, saved links and tabs belong to it and to nothing else. Reopen it and the tabs return in a fresh window at the point you stopped — which turns “switch to the other thing I am working on” from a ten-minute cleanup into a click.
Let the decisions land in the notebook
Chats are transcripts, and a transcript is a poor home for a conclusion — the conclusion is buried at message forty-one between two false starts. As you work, the ideas coming out of a project are written into that project’s notebook: grouped by topic, dated, searchable. A week later the thinking is still legible without scrolling a conversation to find it.
The part that compounds
It also keeps your preferences, your goals and the decisions you have already made, so the second week costs less than the first. Every item shows where it came from, you can delete any single one, and you can switch the whole thing off — off meaning nothing new is written down at all.
And for everything that is not a project
Not every question deserves a filing decision. A quick chat handles the one-off — a definition, a conversion, a fast look around the web — without disturbing your projects. Make it disposable and it is destroyed the moment you leave: not filed, not indexed, and nothing from it reaches what the assistant remembers about you.
That distinction is worth using on purpose. Keep the thread when tomorrow-you will want it. Throw it away when tomorrow-you would rather it had never existed.
A rhythm that survives a bad week
- Monday — empty your head into the panel and let it date and sort the pile.
- During — work inside the project window, where sources and tabs attach themselves.
- Decisions — into the notebook, by topic, so they outlive the chat that produced them.
- Everything small — a quick chat, disposable whenever you would rather not keep it.
None of this needs setting up first. You start by talking, and the structure turns up as a by-product.