Put the whole pile in
Unsorted, unpunctuated, in whatever order your head releases it: the errand, the email, the vague dread that has not been named yet, the thing that has been on the list since March. Nothing has to be filed under a project and no field has to be filled before the next one will go in.
Capture is the part of this you were always able to do. Making you sort at the moment of capture is a tax on the one working step, so there is no tagging, no priority field, and no deadline picker standing between a thought and the pile.
Tap one of four chips
Then you triage the pile yourself, one tap per item, with four chips: two minutes, two hours, two weeks, or not a thing at all.
Small decisions are answerable when large ones are not. "What should I do next?" against forty options is the question that freezes you. "Is this two minutes or two weeks?" against one item is a question almost nobody freezes on, and forty of those taps do the sorting that staring at the list never did.
Take the one it hands back
What comes back is a single task on the screen. Not a list with one row highlighted and not a filter you can widen — the rest is put away until this one is done, because a list you are able to peek at is a list you will peek at.
If the one you are handed is not the one you want, pass on it and the next arrives. It is a suggestion carried out of the triage you already did, not an instruction, and passing costs nothing.
Hidden is not deleted
Everything you dumped is still held in the history and calendar screens, and the insights screen charts your last seven days. Nothing is dropped, merged, summarised away, or quietly aged out for being old — and the whole record exports to CSV whenever you want it elsewhere.
Nothing is keeping score
There is a day streak with milestone celebrations — it counts the days you showed up and says nothing about the days you did not. A fortnight where you did not open this is not a debt, and nothing in here will present it as one.
That is a decision, not an omission. Software that counts your consistency ends up punishing the weeks that were hardest to get through, and this is written for people who have had enough of that.
It asks for nothing to start
Account — optional. Sign in with Apple if you want to, or tap “Continue without signing in” and get the identical app. We never request your email. After that, dumping something needs no thought about being logged in. Your tasks sync only to your own private iCloud; we run no server that can read them.
What this is not
It is not treatment, not diagnosis, and not medical advice — One Thing is a focus tool, not a medical device. It does not assess you and has no opinion about your symptoms. If starting things is consistently costing you work, relationships, or health, that is worth raising with a clinician. The focus guide is the longer reading, and the notes go further into the thinking.
Where it stands
Built for iPhone, iOS 17 and later. On the App Store now: $2.99 a month or $19.99 a year after a 7-day free trial, auto-renewing until you cancel — cancel anytime in App Store settings.