The pile goes away. One thing comes back.
A list of forty tasks is a paralysis machine when your brain will not pick. One Thing takes quick text capture — type the thing, tap one of four chips, done — and turns the pile into something you can actually act on.
Triage is four chips: two minutes, two hours, two weeks, not a thing. You sort each item yourself with one tap, which is the small, answerable decision — and the history and insights screens show you what you sorted and when.
§ I — The program
What One Thing does with everything in your head, what it refuses to do to you afterwards, and the price in plain print.
Everything: the errand, the email you have reread four times, the vague dread with no name yet, the thing that is only a thing because someone mentioned it in March. It goes in as text, unsorted, unpunctuated, and in whatever order your head releases it.
There is no project to file it under and no field you must complete before it will accept the next one. Sorting at the moment of capture is a tax on the one part of this you were always able to do.
The pileThen you triage — not by staring at the pile and feeling the weight, but by tapping one of four chips on each thing: two minutes, two hours, two weeks, or not actually a thing. You make the call; the app just makes the call small.
Small decisions are answerable when large ones are not. Deciding what to do next out of forty options is the task you cannot start; deciding whether one item takes two minutes or two weeks is a task almost nobody freezes on.
The triageEverything you capture stays yours: a history screen with every entry and a calendar view, both free forever, plus a seven-day chart on the home screen. Nothing you dump is ever dropped, summarised away, or quietly aged out. The insights screen — totals, days logged, most-used chip, busiest weekday — is the One Thing Plus half.
Plus also exports the lot to CSV. Add an entry by Siri, glance at the widget or your watch, and set one optional reminder — or none.
The recordThere is a day streak, and it celebrates milestones when you hit them. What there is not: guilt. A week where you opened this twice is not a debt — the streak counts the days you showed up, and says nothing about the days you did not.
No feed, no leaderboard, no cohort. Nobody else sees what is in your pile, and nothing here is engineered to drag you back for our sake.
The streakOne Thing is free to download, and the part that matters is free forever: the capture box, the four chips, the one-card flow, the timers, the routines, the history, the calendar and the streak. One Thing Plus is $2.99 a month, or $19.99 a year — a 7-day free trial first, auto-renewing until you cancel, and cancelling is one switch in your App Store settings. Plus unlocks the insights screen and CSV export.
No tier holds your pile hostage: everything you dump stays readable, searchable and deletable on the free tier, forever. Plus buys the analysis on top of it, not access to your own record. Purchases go through the App Store, so refunds do too: Apple handles them at reportaproblem.apple.com.
Your tasks sync only to your own private iCloud — we run no server that can read them. No ads, we will not sell what you dumped, and we will not use it to train anything.
The house's wordThe pile was never the problem. Being asked to choose from it, forty times a day, with the part of your brain that does not do choosing — that was the problem, and four small chips are how this program takes it away.
Standing prohibitions
Five things One Thing will not do, held as terms of the program rather than as a roadmap that can quietly change.
§ II — The price
What it costs, what the trial does, and how to leave.
$2.99
One Thing is free to download, and free forever for capture, the four chips, the one-card flow, the timers, the routines, the history and the calendar. One Thing Plus — the insights screen and CSV export — is $2.99 a month or $19.99 a year, after a 7-day free trial. Plus plans auto-renew until you cancel, and you can cancel anytime in your App Store settings. Purchases and refunds are handled by Apple through the App Store.
The terms
§ III — Questions
The questions people who have already uninstalled six task apps actually send before they will put a seventh on a phone.
Because the others asked you to build and maintain a system, and maintaining a system is the exact thing your brain will not do reliably. There are no projects to set up here, no tags to keep tidy, and no weekly review to fall behind on. You type the thing, you tap one of four chips, done. If you vanish for three weeks, nothing has decayed and nothing is owed — the pile is simply where you left it.
No. You tap the chip: two minutes, two hours, two weeks, or not a thing. The app's job is to make the decision small enough to make, then hand you exactly one of them — with a countdown sized to the chip you picked and a first 30-second move to get you off the mark. It is not claiming to know your day better than you do.
It is all still there — in the history screen, the calendar, and your own private iCloud, which is the only place it syncs. History and the calendar are free forever and have no cut-off. Nothing you dump is ever dropped, summarised away, or quietly aged out, and Plus exports the lot to CSV whenever you like.
Nothing, to start. The app is free to download, and the triage flow, the one-card pick, the timers, the routines, the history and the calendar are free forever. One Thing Plus — the insights screen and CSV export — is $2.99 a month or $19.99 a year, after a 7-day free trial. The trial becomes the subscription when it ends, it auto-renews until you cancel, and cancelling is one switch in App Store settings. Refunds for App Store purchases are handled by Apple at reportaproblem.apple.com.
No. One Thing is a focus tool, not a medical device, and nothing in it is diagnosis, treatment, or medical advice. It does not assess you, it has no opinion about your symptoms, and it is not a substitute for a clinician. If getting started is consistently costing you work, relationships, or health, that is worth raising with one.
The register
Be written in for news of One Thing.
One address, kept on our ledger and used sparingly. No newsletter follows it, and it is never attached to anything you dump into the app.