An AI assistant for Google Tasks that tells you what actually matters

Capturing tasks was never the hard part. Deciding which of the forty things on the list deserves the next hour is. Murphy, Jarvi's task agent, writes to your real Google Tasks and triages it — from a chat message.

Google Tasks is a good store and a bad manager

Google Tasks does one job well: it holds things, syncs everywhere, and shows up in Gmail. What it cannot do is tell you that three of your open items are genuinely urgent and the other thirty are noise you have been carrying since March. It has no notion of priority beyond a due date, no view of your calendar, and no opinion about anything.

Murphy adds the opinion. It sits on top of your existing lists and applies the triage a good chief of staff would — without asking you to move to yet another to-do app first.

Eisenhower triage, applied automatically

Every task gets placed into one of the four Eisenhower quadrants — urgent and important, important but not urgent, urgent but not important, neither. That sounds academic until you see your own backlog sorted by it: most of what feels pressing turns out to be Q3, and the work that actually moves you forward has been sitting in Q2 untouched for weeks.

Murphy scores urgency from the due date, the priority you gave it and how long it has been open, so the ordering changes as reality does. Ask what to do next and you get an answer, not a list.

It refuses to create the same task twice

Anything that captures tasks from natural language eventually captures the same task twice — you mention the report on Monday, again on Wednesday, and now you have two. Murphy checks before it writes. If a task with that title already exists it updates it in place and tells you it did, rather than quietly adding a duplicate.

It is deliberately not naive about this: the same title on a genuinely different due date is a different occurrence, and a recurring habit is supposed to come back. The check is for accidents, not for repetition you meant.

Capture from a photo

Send a picture of a handwritten list, a whiteboard after a meeting, or an official letter listing documents you need to produce. Jarvi reads it and creates the items together — each one still going through duplicate detection. A checklist that belongs to one goal becomes a single parent task with individually tickable subtasks, rather than a scatter of unrelated items.

Where a subtask carries a realistic time estimate, Jarvi can offer to book calendar time for it, handing the work over to Grim without you re-typing anything.

Cleaning up the backlog you are avoiding

Every task list eventually becomes a graveyard. Two commands deal with it. Ask Murphy to sanitise a given month and it clears what has gone stale. Ask for a strategic realignment and it bulk-reschedules everything overdue onto a new anchor date, so instead of forty items screaming past-due you get one honest, current list.

Neither is destructive by surprise — Murphy tells you what it is about to touch and how many items are involved before it does anything.

Tasks and calendar are one system, not two

The standard failure of task apps is that they are honest about what you intend and silent about whether there is any room for it. A list of twelve items due Friday looks identical whether Friday is empty or already booked solid, which is how a plan that was never physically possible survives until Thursday night.

Because Murphy and Grim share one account and one conversation, that gap closes. Ask what you should be working on and the answer can account for what is already in your calendar. Agree that a task needs two hours and it can become a real block on a real day, with conflict detection applied, without you re-stating anything. Finish early and the freed time is visible to the same assistant that assigned it.

It stays a normal Google Tasks list

Everything Murphy does happens in Google Tasks itself. The items appear in the Tasks panel in Gmail, in the Google Tasks mobile app, and anywhere else you already look at them. Nothing lives in a private database that only exists while you are a customer, and nothing needs exporting if you stop.

This is deliberate. An assistant that stores your work in its own silo is asking you to migrate before it has earned anything, and it makes leaving expensive on purpose. Writing to the list you already have means the worst case of trying Jarvi is a tidier Google Tasks.

What you can actually say

• "Add a task to review the Q3 deck, due Friday 5pm."
• "What should I actually be working on right now?"
• "Here's a photo of my list — put it all in."
• "Everything overdue, move it to next Monday."
• "Clear out anything stale from August."
• "Mark the deck review as done."

Common questions

Real Google Tasks? Yes — via Google's official API. Everything appears in Google Tasks on your phone and in Gmail.

Duplicates? Checked before every write; same-titled tasks are updated in place, not duplicated.

From a photo? Yes, with duplicate detection applied per item.

Unfinished tasks? Sanitise a month, or bulk-reschedule everything overdue to a new date.

Free? One list on the free tier. The Executive removes the limit.