The bucket list
Only ever grows.
Adding is satisfying and costs nothing, so you add. Nothing in the format ever makes something leave.
Reach · A HourLife mini app
A bucket list that can get shorter.
Full by month two, dead by month four. Not because the wishes were unrealistic — because nothing ever came back out.
Reach holds exactly one live wish. The rest sit in a reservoir with no dates and no order. When the live slot is empty, the app deals you a small hand and you choose what to pull down.
Coming to the App Store
How it works
iPhone · iPad · Local-first, iCloud optional · One-time purchase
Why this exists
The obstacle was never that it was hard.
Learn to sail. See the aurora. Take your father somewhere before he cannot travel. None of those are difficult in the sense of requiring rare ability. They are difficult in the sense of never being chosen — because they sit in a list of forty things, all of them equally undated, equally possible, and equally not happening.
The goal app
Wants a deadline.
Put a date on "see the aurora" and you have invented a way to fail at something you wanted for fun.
Reach
Makes you choose one.
Five to look at. One goes live. The other thirty-five are not late, not overdue, and not asking you for anything.
How it works
Write it down. Draw a hand. Hold one wish.
There is no processing, no triage, and no weekly review. The reservoir is meant to be big and quiet.
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01
Write anything you want to do, any time. No dates, no cost estimate, no category.
-
02
When nothing is live, tap draw. Reach deals a small hand — including something old, and something you have passed over before.
-
03
Pull one down and give it a route: the next step, the shape of the effort, and what done will look like.
-
04
To draw again, this one has to end. Finish it, set it down, or let it go.
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05
Every draw, every pass, and every ending stays in the record.
The next step is the whole point of the route. "See the aurora" is not actionable; "check February flight prices to Tromsø" is, and writing the second one is what turns a wish into a thing you are doing.
Three ways it ends
Deciding you no longer want it is a legitimate ending.
This is the part that lets the list shrink. Most bucket lists have one exit — done — so the things you have quietly stopped wanting stay on it forever, and the list slowly becomes a record of who you used to be.
Done
You did it. It goes into the record as done.
Set down
Not now. Back to the reservoir, no mark against it.
Let go
You do not want it any more, and you said so on purpose.
Letting go is the ending nobody builds, and it is the one that makes the rest of the list mean something. What survives ten years of that is a real answer about what you want.
The part that compounds
What you keep reaching for.
Every draw is remembered, including the wishes you passed over.
The wish you have been dealt eleven times and skipped eleven times is not a wish. It is something you think you should want. Reading that is uncomfortable and it is the most useful thing in the app.
Not what you say you want. What you reach for.
No score, no completion percentage, and no comparison to anyone else's list.
Settings
iCloud off by default. It stays off until you say.
Live
One wish, its route, and how it will end.
What it refuses to do
Everything a bucket-list app usually adds.
- No due dates, priorities, or sorting
- No progress bars, completion percentages, or scores
- No streaks and no guilt
- No booking links, affiliate travel offers, or sponsored suggestions
- No social feed and no sharing your list
- No subscription
There is no notification about the wishes still waiting. A wish that sits untouched for four years has not failed at anything.
Private by default
Your wishes 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. All of it.
Writing wishes, the draw, pulling one down, the route, every ending, and the complete record — free for as long as you keep the app.
Paid once · no subscription · nothing to renew
The reservoir
Free
Unlimited wishes, the draw, the live slot, all three endings, and the full record.
Reach Complete
$4.99 once
A read of the patterns in what you choose, the Home Screen widget for the live wish, private iCloud sync, and opt-in local nudges when a wish has been open a while.
Mini app bundle
$9.99 once
Reach, 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
One wish, live.
Reach is built for iPhone and iPad. The mechanism is finished — a future version will not add dates, priorities, or a way to sort the reservoir.
The other layers
One live wish. One live idea.
Idea runs the same mechanism pointed at the things you want to make rather than the things you want to experience. Keeping them apart is the point: a screenplay and a trip to Patagonia do not belong in the same queue.