The to-do list
Grows in one direction.
Adding is free, so everything gets added. Thirty open items is not a plan; it is a description of somebody who has not decided.
One · A HourLife mini app
To place, something must leave.
You do not have one life. You have a job, a body, people, and a couple of things you are trying to make. Each one grows a list, and a list is where things go to not happen.
One gives up to five areas a single slot each, and the slot holds one line in your own words. Placing something new means choosing how the old thing leaves — and the record keeps what displaced what.
Coming to the App Store
How it works
iPhone · Local-first, iCloud optional · One-time purchase
Why this exists
Writing it down was never the hard part.
Every capture tool solves the wrong half. Nothing on a list costs anything to add, so nothing ever has to come back out — and at the end of the month you cannot say where your attention actually went, only what you meant to do with it.
The habit tracker
Grades you for turning up.
Streaks, scores, percentages. It measures the days you opened the app, which is a different subject from the thing you were carrying.
One
Makes the swap explicit.
Five slots, one line each. To put something in, you have to look at what is already there and say how it leaves.
How it works
Name the areas. Place one line. Pay for the next one.
There is no inbox, no triage, and nothing to process on a Sunday. Five slots, and one decision every time a slot changes hands.
-
01
Name your areas in your own words — People, Work, Body, Ideas, Read. Five is the most One holds.
-
02
Place one line in an area: the thing you are actually carrying there, not a project and not a checklist.
-
03
Keep material beside that line — a note, a picture, a scanned page, a PDF — and up to five next lines with no dates and no done state.
-
04
To place something new in a full slot, what is there has to leave: done, set down, or let go. You choose while looking at what you wrote and how long you have carried it.
-
05
That choice, and what displaced what, goes into the record. So does an area that is simply standing open.
The cap of five is in the code, not in Settings. A limit you can raise gets raised the day it first bites, and a sixth area is how this quietly turns back into a list of everything.
Three ways it leaves
Set down and let go are real answers, recorded like the other one.
Most tools have exactly one exit: done. So everything you decided against stays on the list, and after a year the list is a monument to things you never formally abandoned.
Done
It happened. That is what the record says, and nothing else.
Set down
Still matters. Back to the world, unfinished.
Let go
Released, nothing owed. You decided against it and said so.
None of the three is drawn in a colour that means bad — they are three weights of one ink. The moment letting go looks like failure, the record stops being honest and starts being flattering, and a flattering record is not worth keeping.
The part that compounds
The record, and the letter that reads it back to you.
Every one you have placed, every exit, and what displaced what — in order, area by area, for as long as you keep the app.
Once a week One writes to you about what actually moved in your own areas: what was placed, what left and how, what has stood where it stood. It closes on one question you can answer in a single line. Your reply is kept beside it, and the next letter remembers what you said.
The most honest account you have of where your attention went.
Against what you said mattered. Free to read and free to take with you — copy it as text, save it as a picture, or write it out as a PDF.
Record
Every one placed and every exit, in order.
Letter
A week in your own areas, and one question.
What it refuses to do
The shorter list is the honest description.
- No backlog, no someday shelf, no parked items
- No streaks, scores, percentages, or completion rates
- No due dates, priorities, or overdue red
- No sixth area, and no setting that adds one
- No feed, no friends, no sharing
- No subscription
If there is somewhere to put the thing you set down, nothing is ever actually set down. That is why there is no backlog, and it is the hardest absence on this list to live with.
Private by default
Your areas stay on your phone.
There is no account, no sign-up, and no email address to hand over. Nothing leaves the device unless you turn on iCloud sync, which is off until you ask for it and uses your own private iCloud database.
- Storage
- On your iPhone. No server of ours.
- iCloud sync
- Off by default, on when you say so.
- Sign-in
- None. There is nothing to create.
- Tracking
- No ads, no analytics, no attribution.
Pricing
The mechanism is free, and so is everything you wrote.
Two areas with the whole app inside them: placing, the exits, the trade, the days, the complete record, every way out of it, and the letter One writes you each week. Reading what you wrote is never for sale, and neither is what One writes back.
Paid once · no subscription · nothing to renew
Two areas
Free
The whole mechanism, the complete record, every export, and the weekly letter.
One Complete
$4.99 once
All five areas, the front on your Home Screen and all five on the Lock Screen, Patterns — what your record shows across months — and private iCloud sync.
Mini app bundle
$9.99 once
One, every other HourLife mini app, and every mini app added later — at no extra cost.
See everything in the bundleBoth are bought inside the app and charged once. Prices are in USD; the App Store charges Apple's regional price in your own currency. The bundle covers the mini apps — HourLife itself, the full Life OS, is a separate product and is not included.
Version 1.0 · Coming to the App Store
Days is the only number, and it never grades you.
One shows how long you have carried something and then stays out of the argument. Eleven days means it matters, or it means it is too big to be one thing — and working out which is yours to do, not the app's to score.
The other layers
The five slots. The whole life behind them.
One is the smallest version of the question: what are you carrying, and where. HourLife is the other end of the range. One purchase covers both.