Browser Workflows with BrainTool
This post describes ways BrainTool can improve your browser workflows. It’s illustrated with a set of short videos and video shorts.
Intro
BrainTool is a browser extension that allows you to save, annotate, categorize and re-find web pages; as well as open, close and organize browser windows and tabs. And since an open tab is basically a task, BrainTool is also a basic task manager! This 40 second video gives the motivation and an animated overview: BrainTool Intro.
| The BrainTool 'Topic Manager' holds your topic organization and saved pages per topic. From there you can find pages and open and close their tabs. The 'Bookmarker' is a browser toolbar tool that lets you save pages under a given topic, with optional notes. This 44 second screen recording shows an overview: BT in Brief |
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Topic Hierarchy
BrainTool’s hierarchical topics are a great organizational tool. This 38 second video illustrates drag and drop topic organization, as well as dragging external links into the topic tree: BT Drag and Drop.
Search/Filter/Find
BrainTool also has powerful searching and filtering functions to help you find what you’re looking for. Another video short shows how that works: Search, Filter, Find.
Task Management
Topics and tabs can be tracked as tasks in BrainTool’s basic task manager. Here’s a one minute demo of it in action, as well as a brief flash of its ability to use plain text org-mode files to integrate into a larger productivity and PKM system: BrainTool TODO Manager.
As well as those basic workflows there are any number of other ways BrainTool’s capabilities can improve your browser productivity. Here’s a few, demonstrated in short videos. No doubt there are many more.
Bookmark Bar Workflow
BrainTool’s bookmarks bar integration provides a handy way to pre-load every browser window with a set of links organized and ready to go during a meeting, class, presentation or offsite: Bookmarks Bar Workflow.
CheckList Workflow
It’s common to have a set of dashboards or project pages or some other set of websites that you need to review or update on a periodic basis. This is the ‘Checklist Workflow’. Here’s how BrainTool can help make sure you get to those tasks on time and make it more efficient to check them off: Checklist Workflow.
LLM Context Population
Another way BrainTool can be useful is to Populate an LLM’s context window with information from your saved links, topics and notes. Since the data is in readable org-mode text format it’s ideal for consumption by an LLM. Cmd/Ctrl-c will copy the data for the selected topic and its children onto your clipboard and from there you can paste it into an LLM prompt. To see an example of this in use go to the 10:30 timestamp in this great BrainTool review from productivity guru Santi Younger.
Shopping Workflow
Finally for this post, the ‘Shopping Workflow’ shows how you can keep your options organized when you’re shopping online: Shopping Workflow
Are there other productivity improving techniques or workflows that BrainTool enables for you? LMK in the comment here.
16 Sep 2025 - Written by Tony
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