My work did not have a single inbox. It had a small archipelago.
A follow-up lived in Gmail. A promise I made lived in Slack. Planned work lived in Jira. Bugs and ideas waited in GitHub issues. Articles I absolutely intended to read were spread across browser tabs—some of them old enough to have tenure.
Notion held my meeting notes and personal to-do list. I liked it as a record of what happened and why, but turning every useful sentence into a task was manual, and manual task creation has a special talent for happening “later.”
Codex was where much of the actual work got done. I tried asking an agent to scan every source and create the tasks for me. In theory, that sounded ideal. In practice, I learned that the scan itself was valuable: reading the remaining messages helped me absorb the details, tone, and connections.
I wanted less administration, not less awareness.
I did not need an agent to stand between me and the information. I needed a faster way to capture the follow-ups I noticed while reading it. Preserve the intentional scan, then remove the administrative work that comes after it.
That principle became StickStash: select the useful sentence, stash it as a task or bookmark, and keep the source attached. Interesting reading gets its own lane instead of quietly becoming another obligation.
The gap between good tools was the problem.
Every switch carried a tiny tax: open the app, remember what I was looking for, decide whether it was still relevant, copy the context somewhere else, then find my way back. One switch is harmless. Fifty switches turn a thoughtful day into administrative confetti.
I did not want another heavyweight project-management system. I wanted one small thing that held the loose ends together.
Gather. Focus. Remember.
StickStash gathers tasks and bookmarks without pretending the original source no longer matters. It gives me one place to choose what deserves attention, start a focus window, and send the work to Claude Code or Codex. Notion can remain the durable record.
The built-in timer matters too. A clean list does not automatically create concentration. “Pick one thing for 25 minutes” is much kinder than “be productive now.” And when the focus window ends, Chuck is there to make the break feel like part of the system—not an interruption to it.
What I am building toward
StickStash is personal software in the most literal sense: it comes from the shape of my own workday. If it works, I spend less time maintaining a system and more time doing the work—or deliberately not doing the work because I am on a break. Both are wins.