People have shared their to-do lists by screenshot for years, and for the moment the picture is taken it works fine. You crop the top of the screen, send it, and the person on the other end knows roughly what your day holds. The screenshot just cannot keep up. An hour later it describes a day that has already moved on.

That was the actual request when people asked for sharing in Slate: a way to let someone see the day without having to keep re-sending it. A partner checking whether the school pickup made the list, a coach who wants to see the plan rather than rearrange it.

The usual version was the wrong one

Most apps solve this by adding a collaborator. You type an email, they accept an invite, and their name sits on your week next to yours, usually with permission to edit whatever they find there. That design makes sense for a project that genuinely belongs to several people. A single person’s week is different: the moment somebody else can move a task in it, your private estimate turns into a small negotiation.

So the share button in Slate publishes a page instead of sending an invite.

What the visitor gets

The link shows a copy of the day: the tasks, ticked or not, and whatever notes came with them.

The visitor can read it, and reading is the entire feature. The checkboxes do not respond, there is nowhere to type or comment, and nobody needs an account just to look.

It also expires

A link lasts a day, three days, or a week, whichever the sharer picks, and it can be pulled back at any point before that. That fits how the rest of Slate already works: an undone task rolls forward, and a finished day is forgotten by the next one. Nothing here was built to be permanent, and a link that never expired would have been the one thing that outlived everything else.

The window in the title is the whole design. Someone outside can see what today looks like, but they cannot come in and move the furniture. For a week that belongs to the person living it, I think that is as far as sharing should go.