A calm, local-first focus companion for attention that scatters — capture the noise, break the overwhelm into chunks, and pick up exactly where you left off after every distraction. It's durable working memory, so no context is lost and no thought is stranded on the wrong machine.
Private by design
No cloud, no account — it never leaves your laptop.
Plain Markdown vault
Just files you can read, grep, and back up.
Works with your agent
Lives in your menu bar and terminal — and inside Claude, Codex, Cursor, Copilot & Windsurf.
TODAY · SUN, MAY 31
Pasaportes vigentes
VISA-FAMILIA · today
Declaración impuestos 2025
pressing · 45d overdue
01 — The attention tax
Squirrel is built for the way attention actually behaves — it does the remembering so you don't have to. It's durable working memory for minds that jump between projects: no context lost, no decision forgotten, no deadline silently slipped, no thought trapped on the wrong machine.
One ping and the whole mental stack is gone. Rebuilding it costs 20 minutes you didn't have.
It's too big to look at. So it sits, and it stares, and the guilt grows louder than the task.
Sticky notes, three apps, the back of a receipt. Capture is easy — finding it again is not.
"Due Friday" feels infinitely far away — right up until it's Friday at 4pm.
02 — What it does
Squirrel doesn't nag you to be more disciplined. It handles the remembering, the chunking, and the context-rebuilding so your attention is free for the work.
Brain-dump a thought the instant it appears, mid-task, without losing focus. It lands in the right pile automatically.
/sq-capture
Hand Squirrel a task that feels impossible. It splits it into 20-minute pieces and hands you the very first one.
/sq-chunk
Pulled away? One command reloads your last session — what you were doing, why, and the exact next step — so re-entry takes seconds.
/sq-start
…and the rest of the toolkit
When you finally lock in, Squirrel protects the flow — and nudges you toward breaks before the day disappears.
hyperfocus-guardian
Due dates rise to the top before they bite. Squirrel reads the urgency and tells you what genuinely can't wait.
/sq-deadlines
Need to tell a lead where things stand? Get a clean six-section brief of every project in seconds.
/sq-brief
Every few hours the Mind Journal asks what you're thinking and what you're doing — a one-tap mood log that externalizes the swirl before it runs the day.
mind-journal
Move context between your personal and corporate machines as hash-verified Markdown packages you paste yourself — diffed against your vault and applied atomically, with zero network calls.
/sq-sync-out
Overrule the heuristic. Declare what today and this week are really about — your pick expires daily and weekly, so you re-commit instead of drifting.
/sq-focus
Set a separate morning and afternoon intent, then check in and out — Squirrel logs the time you actually spent and shows it back to you.
AM · PM
Squirrel pads your estimate for ADHD time-blindness, then measures what it actually took. Over time the gap closes into a signal you can trust.
/sq-estimate
Attach a reminder date to any task or note. It quietly resurfaces a week ahead, then parks in "Reminder due" until you act — separate from deadline pressure.
/sq-reminders
A protected catch-all project that's always there from first launch — a safe home for ideas and captures that don't belong to any project yet.
scratch-pad
Grab a thought before you know what it is. Pin it, color it, drag it around a sticky-note board — and convert it into a task or note once it makes sense.
post-its
A two-minute interruption doesn't have to break focus. Drop it on the Quick Task stack — capped at five, cleared in order — and stay in the work.
quick-tasks
A notification center lives inside the menu-bar popup with unread badges and history. Native banners deep-link straight to the exact card and pulse it into view.
tray inbox
Already living in Obsidian? A copy-only migration maps your existing notes into Squirrel's structure — with a dry-run plan you approve before anything is written.
/sq-migrate-vault
One global shortcut brings the popup to the front from any app, then hides it back to the tray when you're done. No Dock clutter, no window-hunting.
⌃⌘S
Squirrel ships into Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Copilot, and Windsurf as portable skills and commands — not one more cloud API you have to log into.
/sq-*
03 — The loop
No elaborate methodology to abandon by Tuesday. Just a rhythm loose enough to actually keep.
Whatever's rattling around — a task, a worry, a half-idea — throw it at Squirrel and keep moving.
› /sq-capture
# "email the landlord re: lease"
→ filed under @home ✓When something feels too heavy to start, ask Squirrel to slice it into a first step you can't say no to.
› /sq-chunk "quarterly report"
# 5 chunks · ~20 min each
→ start: open last quarter's docDistracted? Tomorrow? Next week? One command rebuilds the full picture and points you at the next thing.
› /sq-start report
# last touched 2 days ago
→ you're on chunk 3 of 504 — The payoff
The point isn't more productivity — it's a quieter mind. When the remembering happens somewhere safe, the stress, the clutter, and the low-grade dread have somewhere to go.
Your head stops being the only place your work lives. Captures, chunks, and decisions are held for you — so you can put something down without the fear of losing it.
One vault instead of sticky notes, three apps, and the back of a receipt. Projects, notes, and deadlines land in the right place on their own — clutter never piles up.
Nothing slips silently. Deadlines surface before they bite and the Mind Journal checks in every few hours — so the "what am I forgetting?" dread has nowhere left to grow.
05 — Yours, actually
Squirrel is a vault of plain Markdown files on your own machine. It runs offline — there's no server holding your half-formed thoughts hostage, and nothing to subscribe to. Deterministic work runs in local scripts, so your agent only handles judgment — a typical session costs a fraction of the tokens.
Plain Markdown vault. Read it, grep it, back it up, version it with Git, or open it in Obsidian. It's just files.
Runs on localhost. The backend serves only 127.0.0.1 — nothing leaves your laptop.
Lives in your menu bar. A native macOS popup, plus a CLI, a local web UI, and skills inside your AI agents.
Air-gap by design. Move context between worlds with hash-verified packages you paste — the human is the bridge, never a sync robot.
📁 projects/
📁 migration/
📄 intent.md
📄 chunks.md
📄 decisions.md
📁 captures/
📄 inbox.md
📁 sessions/
📄 2026-05-31-shutdown.md
config.tomlInstall Squirrel, point it at a folder, and tell your agent /sq-status. That's the whole setup.