OrganizeYou — Journey of a pet project!

Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/organizeyou/jbklehanlglahdjcjililkmdmbngffjn?hl=en

Edge: https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/detail/dnbgckcbophhohmncbhjphngnnidamjg

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/organizeyou/

Journey,

Since remote work started, one of the challenge that I personally faced was

How can I stick to the agenda for the day?

Here’s what all I tried,

• Started using reminder apps (all of them are nosy and noisy and they have snooze button)
• Started writing my agenda for the day on paper → Now I needed someone to remind me to look at this list
• Searched on app stores (android/mac) and found multiple app options but again apps stay behind so many windows open on my Mac

The thing about distraction is you never realise you’re distracted. It takes away time from you minute by minute and at the end of the day all you’re left with is lot of pending work and guilt of not getting things done.

This gave me enough motivation to find a solution which is,

• Not distracting in itself (reminders/notifications)
• Minimalistic — so it should do just one thing and should do it well.

I started using chrome extension. And ohh boy there are so many of them. However my goal was very clear I wanted something minimalistic yet functional. For me minimalism doesn’t mean less features but it means less noise and distraction.

I stumbled up multiple apps which were more or less matching my criteria but then none of them what I was looking for:

• Why will I pay for a simple todo app?
• Why are you connecting and sending my data to your servers?
• Why do you need so many permissions on my browser?

After using every app all I could say was:

Dude! seriously get off my personal space!!!

One fine day I decided to write something very simple which will be unlike any of the above apps!

Here is what helped me decide:

• I do need an honest app which does only what it says!
• It should not have any hidden agenda of collecting user data in the name of “helping user”.
• Should be minimalistic yet functional
• I’m not going out on weekends (credits to COVID19) so I have enough time.
• I had recently started learning react as part of project requirement.
• I have never built anything that is publicly available to community.
• We open new tab on our browser at-least 50 times a day, why do we need reminders explicitly?
• I did not want to re-invent the wheel. So I decided to use many existing open-source components.

These reasons were enough to give me sleepless nights to come-up with simplest requirement possible.

Time couldn’t have been better and OrganizeYou was born. So what it is:

OrganizeYou is a simple browser extension that replaces your new tab and keeps agenda of the day in-front of you.

Here’s something that I can boast about this app.

Apps are meant to help people. They shouldn’t control our lives. OrganizeYou is one such app, and will remain to be so.

• No data collection.
• No hidden agenda. No spamming
• Does only what it says. No bullshit. Period.

App features:

• Lets you add task for the day
• Dark mode (like duh)
• Compact mode to hide tasks
• Google search
• No reminders (There are too many app notifications/reminders, OrganizeYou not going to be another one. EVER!)

So OrganizeYou let’s you add task with least number of clicks possible.

It has simplest setting panel with most basic features.

Even minimalist needs dark mode.

What if you don’t want tasks thrown at your face all the time. Compact mode to rescue.

How about adding tasks to some specific dates?

This is all folks. Hope you liked it.