The to-do list I actually finish has one item on it

I lead a sizable engineering team, I run a side company, and I have two young kids. My to-do list, on the days I keep one, is less a plan than a monument to everything I am not getting to. It stopped being useful years ago. What actually works is smaller and a little embarrassing: I pick one thing that matters that day and ignore the rest until it is done. That One Thing is an app that does exactly that, and nothing else.

The problem with the list

A to-do list has a design flaw: it has no opinion. Twenty items sit there with equal weight, so choosing what to actually do becomes a task of its own, and the small, easy items tend to win because they are easy. The list grows faster than it shrinks and settles into a low background hum of guilt you carry around all day. Committing to a single most important task takes the choosing away. There is one thing, you do it. Productivity folks have circled this idea for decades, from the Ivy Lee method to “eat the frog”, and it all reduces to the same move: decide the one thing that matters before the day fills up with everything else.

What the app is

That One Thing holds exactly one task. You set it, you see it, you finish it. The part I like most is the Home Screen widget: your one thing sits on your Home Screen, so every time you pick up your phone to get distracted, the task is looking back at you. Reminders name it too, a nudge that says your one thing for today rather than a generic “you have things to do”. That is the entire app. The restraint is the point.

Making it yours

The free app does the job as it comes. Premium is about making it pleasant to look at every day, since it is a screen you glance at constantly: custom backgrounds and gradients, your own photos with a blur, and a set of fonts and colors, so it looks like yours rather than mine.

Try it

That One Thing is free, runs in over 30 languages, and has full VoiceOver support. If your to-do list has quietly turned into a list of regrets, try shrinking it to one.

That One Thing on the App Store

Built at Appgineering, the studio I co-founded.