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A todo list with Claude built in: why I keep coming back to this layout
Every todo app added "AI" somewhere around 2024. Most of them did it the wrong way: a sidebar with a generic chatbox that can't read your todos, plus a few canned actions like "summarize my list" that nobody uses twice.
Taskelo is a take on a different layout. One page, three panels: todos on the left, a notes canvas in the middle, and Elo on the right. Elo is an assistant powered by Claude, and the point of the layout is that it already knows what's on your list. Every message you send includes your todos, notes, and goals as context.
What changes when the assistant can read your list
Three things, none of them dramatic on their own.
"Plan today" stops being a useless question. Elo can read what's open, what's stale, what's recurring, and give you a real ordering. If you've got a 9am call and you wrote "draft proposal" three times this week, it will tell you to do the proposal first.
You can ask half-formed questions. "I'm stuck on the third one" is a complete sentence in Taskelo, because Elo knows what the third todo is. You don't have to re-state the context every time, and you don't have to copy-paste a list into a prompt.
You stop opening claude.ai for work questions. If the model is already in the page with your work loaded, opening a separate tab starts to feel disproportionate.
The layout
| Panel | What it's for |
|---|---|
| Todos | a keyboard-friendly list: today, daily habits, and a later pile |
| Canvas | free-form notes, markdown, drafts |
| Elo | chat with your todos, notes, and goals as live context |
Everything syncs to your account, so the same list is waiting on your laptop and your phone. You can export all of it as JSON with one button, and deleting your account wipes it in one click.
What the chat actually does
A few examples of how the layout pays off in practice.
Ask "break the third one into subtasks" and Elo reads your list, picks the third item, and offers four to six subtasks. It can add them to your list directly, or you can copy them in by hand.
Ask "I wrote some notes about the database migration in the canvas, what am I missing" and the canvas content is already in the prompt. No pasting.
Ask "what did I finish yesterday" and Elo groups completed items by date, since the list includes timestamps. Useful for standups and weeklies.
Ask "draft a Friday email summarizing the week" and the completed todos, the open ones, and the canvas notes are enough material for a coherent recap. The draft lands in the chat, and you copy it out.
Why this is not a deep AI integration
Taskelo doesn't generate todos for you automatically, doesn't background-classify your tasks into projects and tags, and doesn't "learn over time." There is no embeddings database and no fine-tune; what Elo knows is what's on the page right now.
(The one proactive exception is the daily brief, which emails or pushes you a short summary at a time you pick. See the daily brief post for how that works and why it's kept separate from chat.)
This is on purpose. Auto-classification features sound great in demos and are usually wrong in practice: they create cleanup work, they're hard to undo, and they make a simple tool feel like an enterprise product. Taskelo's bet is that "the assistant can read your list" is the AI feature you actually need. If you want to see how that bet holds up against a bolt-on assistant, I wrote a comparison with Todoist's AI.
Getting started
Open taskelo.com and sign in with a magic link. No password, no card. Todos, notes, goals, and the schedule view are free forever, and every new account gets Elo free for the first 14 days. After that, keeping Elo and the daily brief is $8/month.
If you've been bouncing between a todo app and claude.ai for a year, this layout is worth fifteen minutes. The feature list and pricing have the details.