Helpers loading with each include statement

Helpers in CodeIgniter are not really necessary anymore. Just use a class to wrap often used miscellaneous functions that don't make sense to include in your other classes. I believe helpers are more or less a holdover from previous versions of CI.

Always looking to learn. Can you give me an example of how you would do this? 

I want to display a badge with the count of ToDo's for the user at the top of the screen. This would be on every screen so would need to be accomplished outside the controller for that page (since there are dozens of controllers, each with dozens of pages). Needs to be something global in other words.