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.
Answer a few small questions
Then the pile is triaged: a short series of questions about each item in turn. How long is it really. Does it matter this week. Is it actually yours to do. Is it, on inspection, not actually a thing at all.
Small questions 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 answering forty of those does 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 order the triage put it, on your device. Nothing is dropped, merged, summarised away, or quietly aged out for being old. The rest of the pile is out of sight because seeing it is the thing that stopped you — not because we stopped keeping it.
Nothing is keeping score
There is no streak, no badge, no confetti, and no chart of the days you managed it against 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, always. Emptying your head into it needs no email address, no sign-in, and no network connection, because the moment you need to dump something is not the moment to discover you are logged out. Your tasks stay on the device.
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 18 and later. Not yet released and not yet priced — the price is published on the program page before launch, and the register opens first.