My problem, years ago, was the new tab. I'd open one to check a single thing, land on the Google homepage, forget the single thing entirely, and surface forty minutes later having read about volcanoes. You know the move.
I didn't want a productivity system. I wanted a Post-it note that I couldn't lose. So I built one, and it's still one of my favourite things I've made.
What it is
MyTodos replaces your new-tab page with a plain list of the things you said you'd do. That's the whole pitch.
- Open a tab, see your to-dos.
- Tick them off when they're done.
- Add new ones as they occur to you.
- The date and time, off in a corner.
- That's it. Genuinely.
What it deliberately isn't
No accounts. No sync. No cloud. No premium tier. No AI assistant. No integrations with sixteen project-management tools. No suggestions, no notifications, no calendar, no habit tracker, no streaks, no leaderboard.
Just a list, in your browser, on your machine, belonging to you.
Why so stripped back?
Most productivity software is built to be sticky. It wants you back. It pings you, hands out badges, turns your chores into a game you can lose. For most apps that's the business model working as designed.
For a to-do list, I think it's backwards. A to-do list should be staff, not company. You glance at it, you act, you get on with your day. The fewer times you think about the list, the more time you've got for the things on it. So MyTodos is built to be forgettable on purpose. Open a tab, read it, close it, carry on. If it's doing its job, you barely notice it's there.
On privacy, briefly
Everything lives in your browser's local storage and never leaves your machine. There are no servers. I don't know what's on your list, how many items it has, or whether you opened it today. No analytics. No business model. It's free, it stays free, and there's no catch.
It's a slightly odd thing to have to spell out about a piece of software. It didn't used to be.
How to get it
One thought on small software
We don't make many consumer apps these days — Partech's work is mostly AI consulting for companies now. But this one we keep alive, because a steady few hundred people still open it every day, and their emails are reliably among the nicest we get.
It's not a business and was never going to be. It's a small, free tool that doesn't try to own its users — a tiny contribution to making our corner of the web a bit more pleasant to live in. If you make small things too, I'd love to hear about them.
