You already keep a separate master list. Here's what that's telling you.

Whenever I talk to someone who juggles several clients, I ask the same question: where do you actually keep track of everything? Not the client’s Asana, not their Notion — everything, across all of them.

Nearly everyone gets a slightly sheepish look and admits to the same thing. A notebook by the keyboard. A todo.txt that syncs between machines. A giant Apple Note. A whiteboard only they can see. A separate master list that lives outside every client’s tool, because none of those tools can show them the whole.

They usually apologise for it, like it’s a sign they haven’t found the right app yet. I think it’s the opposite. That list is the most honest piece of your stack, and it’s trying to tell you something.

The list exists because the whole is missing

You didn’t start a master list for fun. You started it the day you realised that “what do I actually have to do” is a question none of your tools could answer — because each one only knows about its own client. The list is where you reassemble a picture that your software insists on keeping in pieces.

So the list isn’t a personal failing. It’s a user-authored patch for a hole in the market: nobody sold you the cross-client view, so you built a crude one by hand. The fact that thousands of independent people all invented the same workaround is not a coincidence. It’s a product spec.

Why Notion doesn’t close the gap

“Just use Notion for your own stuff,” people say. And you can — I did, for a while. But a personal Notion has two problems for this specific job.

First, it’s manual and disconnected. Your master list in Notion doesn’t know that the Acme task you finished in Acme’s tool is done. You copy things across by hand, and a hand-copied list rots the moment you get busy — which is exactly when you need it. A list you can’t trust is worse than no list, because now you check two places and believe neither.

Second, it’s yet another tool, not a layer above your tools. It sits beside your clients’ systems, competing for your attention, rather than gathering from them.

Notion is a wonderful blank canvas. But the cross-client master list shouldn’t be something you laboriously maintain. It should be something that maintains itself.

Why switching faster isn’t it either

The other common answer is a browser tool — Wavebox, browser profiles, a wall of pinned tabs — one shortcut per client. These are genuinely good at what they do: they make switching fast and keep sessions from colliding.

But faster switching doesn’t build the list. Ten perfectly organised client tabs still can’t show you one combined Tuesday, because each tab is still a single client’s world. You’ve made the switch cheaper without removing the need to switch. The master list — the aggregate — still lives only in your head or your notebook.

That’s the distinction that matters: fast switching is about moving between silos; the master list is about dissolving them. Different problem, different tool.

What the list wants to become

Picture the notebook, but alive. Tick a task in a client’s own tool and it checks itself off here. Add a line here and it lands in the right client’s list, tagged and dated. One screen that shows today across Acme, Studio North and Coop at once — the exact view your paper list is a low-resolution sketch of.

That’s what I’m building TinyHub to be: not another canvas to keep up to date by hand, and not a faster way to flip between silos, but the home base your master list has been standing in for all along — connected to your work instead of copied from it.

If you keep a list like that, you already understand the product better than any pitch could explain it. Come see the real version.