A daily briefing from your notes, reminders and calendar

A good day starts with knowing what needs you. Barside builds a daily briefing from your notes on one page: reminders that are late or due today, meeting commitments you have not finished, unchecked checklist items, decisions from recent meetings and the rest of today’s calendar. It is worked out on your computer from what you already saved, so it needs no AI, no account and no internet connection, and it covers every workspace you include.

Barside is a free desktop app for Windows, Linux and Mac. The briefing lives in Library & briefing, next to AI search and meeting follow-up.

What the daily briefing from your notes shows

Open the Daily briefing tab and the page starts with “What needs your attention?”, today’s date and the number of included workspaces. Then, from top to bottom:

Every section after the suggestions shows how many items it holds, and an empty list says so plainly, such as “No overdue reminders or reminders due today.” Today’s calendar appears once you connect a calendar. The refresh button at the top rebuilds the page after you change something elsewhere.

How to open your briefing

• Library & briefing in the sidebar, then the Daily briefing tab.
• The book icon at the top of Barside (Ask library & daily briefing), or Library & daily briefing on the desktop bar.
• The search bar: press Alt+Shift+Space in any app, type brief and press Enter.
• The AI assistant: ask “What needs my attention today across all my workspaces?” and choose Open daily briefing. This way uses your connected AI to understand the request.

Default Mode, Writer Mode, Reader Mode and Team Mode all keep Library & briefing in the sidebar, so it stays close whichever of the app modes you use.

A five-minute morning routine

1. Open the briefing and start with Suggested next actions. Click the first one to open its note.
2. Scan Today’s calendar. Press Meeting note on a call you want notes for: Barside fills a note from the Meeting notes template with the title, time, people and place. Press it again later and the same note opens.
3. Clear Today & overdue. Open each reminder’s note and do the thing, then press Done on its reminder, or move the time with the note’s bell.
4. Go through Unfinished commitments and press Mark complete on what is done. That also clears its reminder.
5. Skim Unchecked note tasks. Tick what you finished in its note, or give an item a date with + date so it lands in the right column of the task board.
6. Refresh the briefing. What is left is your day.

How suggested next actions are chosen

The suggestions follow plain rules, not AI, so you always know why something is there:

1. A reminder first: the oldest overdue reminder, or your next reminder today.
2. An open commitment that is not already among today’s reminders. When it has no reminder, the suggestion asks you to choose a next step or a reminder time.
3. The first unfinished checklist item in your included notes.
4. A recent decision, only when nothing else is waiting, with the question of whether it needs follow-through.

What feeds the briefing

The briefing shows only what your library knows, so a few habits make it better:

• Put reminders on notes. Press the bell on a note and pick a time. A due reminder stays until you finish or snooze it. See reminders on notes.
• Connect your calendar. In Settings, under Calendars, choose Add calendar and paste the private iCal (ICS) address from Google Calendar or Outlook. The dialog shows where to find it, and Check address loads it once before you save. Barside refreshes each calendar every 15 minutes, and you can add up to 10. Pick a workspace under Meeting notes go to, and keep Remind me before meetings on for a quiet alert 2 minutes before each call (or 1, 5 or 10). See your calendar next to your notes.
• Use checklists. Any checklist item in any note appears under Unchecked note tasks until you tick it, including tasks you add on the Tasks board.
• Follow through on meetings. Tasks you save from Meeting follow-through, and reminders you approve from the meeting agent, become open commitments with an owner. The meeting’s decisions stay under Recent decisions for 14 days, with the quote that settled each one, as long as the transcript note stays unchanged.

Keep the briefing short

A briefing is only useful if you can read it in a minute. As your library grows, a few habits keep it that way:

• Leave old projects out. In Library & briefing → Sources, untick a finished project’s workspace. Its notes stay in your library and in search, but they leave the briefing, AI answers and agents.
• Close checklists you gave up on. Unchecked note tasks lists every unticked item, so tick or delete the ones that no longer matter. Undo on the task board brings back a task you deleted by mistake.
• Date what matters. Items with a due date sort into Overdue, Today and Tomorrow on the task board, so you can find today’s work fast even when the briefing list is long.
• Mark commitments complete as you go. A finished commitment leaves the briefing and its reminder stops.
• Give undated commitments a time. An open commitment without a reminder shows up in the suggested next actions with a prompt to choose a next step or a reminder time.

Let an agent write a briefing for you

The daily briefing is a live page you open. If you would rather receive a short written summary each morning, use the Morning briefing preset in AI agents. It runs on weekdays at 8:30 AM, reads your open tasks, reminders, recent notes and calendar, and writes a note that starts with what is due or overdue today, then today’s calendar, then the open tasks that matter most, and ends with three suggested next steps. Any reminder, task or email it suggests waits in your approval inbox.

With Barside Plus, cloud agents can run the Morning briefing on Barside’s server even when your computer is off, from your synced notes, tasks and reminders (the calendar stays on your computer). If you use Claude Desktop or ChatGPT, Barside’s AI connections also offer a Plan my day prompt that looks at your open tasks and suggests a short plan for today.

Examples

• A freelance designer opens the briefing with her coffee. It shows one overdue invoice reminder, two client calls with Meeting note buttons, and a commitment from Monday’s call to send revised mockups.
• A team lead works in Team Mode. After each weekly sync he saves the tasks from Meeting follow-through, and the briefing shows who owns what until he marks each one complete.
• A student puts reminders on exam notes and due dates on assignment checklists. The briefing shows the reminders due today across every course workspace, and the task board sorts the assignments by date.
• A writer keeps a repeating Daily journal note from note templates and uses the briefing to pick the one task that comes before writing.

Details and limits

• The briefing includes every workspace and note you leave in Library AI. Excluded ones, set in Library & briefing → Sources, never appear.
• Unchecked note tasks lists every unticked item, dated or not. For a view sorted by due date, use the task board.
• Calendar events come from the last refresh, and events you declined are left out. Barside only reads calendars and never changes them.
• Reminders alert on time while Barside runs, usually in the tray. Barside catches up after sleep or a restart, but it cannot wake a computer that is off.
• It works the same on Windows 10 and 11, on Linux and on Mac.

Privacy

The briefing is computed on your computer from your saved notes, reminders and calendar copies. No AI is involved and nothing is uploaded. Calendar feeds are downloaded from Google or Microsoft every 15 minutes, and the private calendar address is stored encrypted on your computer. Read how calendar feeds are stored and how Library uses your data.

How it compares

A separate planner means copying your tasks into yet another app. Barside builds the briefing from the notes, checklists and meetings you already have, on your own computer. If you are choosing a notes app, read the list of the best note-taking apps or the Notion alternative guide.

Works well with