I've been talking for a while about building a home screen widget for Focus Mode, a live countdown you could start without opening the app. That one's still in progress. What actually shipped first, and what I didn't originally plan to build before it, are two smaller widgets: one for adding a task, one for jotting a quick note. Neither has a timer. Both turned out to matter more than I expected.
Why These Shipped First
A focus timer widget needs to track running state, a countdown that updates live, a session that can be paused and resumed, all from outside the app itself. That's genuinely hard to get right without it feeling laggy, which is exactly why it's taken longer. A quick-add widget doesn't have any of that complexity. It's a text field and a button. There's no state to keep in sync, no countdown to redraw. It was the obvious thing to ship while the harder problem was still being solved properly instead of rushed.
The Actual Problem Both Widgets Solve
The friction isn't writing the task or the note, it's everything before you get to write it: unlock the phone, find the app icon, wait for it to open, tap the right button, then finally type. For a thought that took two seconds to have, that's an absurd amount of overhead, and it's exactly the kind of overhead that makes people just not capture the thought at all. A kanban board and a notes list are only useful if things actually get into them.
What Each Widget Actually Does
- Task widget: a text field sitting on the home screen. Type a task title, tap add, it lands directly on your Todo column with today's date. No app to open, no board to navigate first.
- Notes widget: the same idea for a quick note, tap, type, done, and it shows up in your flat notes list the next time you open the app.
Neither widget shows your existing list. That was a deliberate cut, not an oversight, explained below.
What I Deliberately Left Out
Both widgets are capture-only. You can't see your task list, mark something done, or edit an existing note from the widget itself. That's the same instinct behind Focus Mode's habit of cutting decoration: a widget trying to be a mini version of the whole app ends up doing everything a little worse than either the widget or the app would do alone. I'd rather ship one thing, fast capture, that works reliably than a scrollable list widget that's slow to render and awkward to tap accurately.
Where This Is Honestly Limited
Both widgets are Android only, same as the rest of Taskaro right now, there's no iOS app for a widget to attach to yet. They also don't support setting a due date, priority, or note tags at creation, that all has to be added afterward inside the app. If you need more than a plain title captured instantly, the widget isn't trying to be that tool. It's trying to be faster than opening the app, and adding more input fields to it would work directly against that.
The Actual Point
A task you didn't write down because opening the app felt like too much friction is a task that's already lost. These two widgets exist to close that specific two-second gap between having a thought and getting it somewhere it won't disappear. The focus timer widget is still coming. This was the smaller, faster problem worth solving first.