One frog: how the planner handles a day with too much in it

The advice is old and everyone has heard it: do the hardest thing first. Eat the frog. The problem is not that the advice is wrong, it is that no software actually holds you to it. Every planner will happily let you mark nine tasks as high priority, at which point you have not prioritised anything — you have made a list with a decoration on it.

The rule

In Kintsugi you can nominate one task a day as the one that matters. Try to nominate a second and the app refuses, and asks which of the two it should be. You are always allowed to swap. You are never allowed to have both.

Why one, and not three

The point is not the task. It is being made to choose. A list of twenty things is a decision you have to make twenty times, and a brain that runs on interest and urgency rather than importance will make it zero times. A list of one is a decision already taken, before the day filled up and took the choice away from you.

Pick the thing you are most likely to avoid — usually the one with a bit of dread attached. That is the whole method, and it is old enough that Mark Twain gets the credit for it.

What happens when you do not do it

Nothing. It rolls to tomorrow if you want it to, or you drop it. There is no counter of undone frogs, no percentage, nothing turns red, and the app does not mention it again. A record of every day you fell short is not a productivity feature. It is a machine for feeling behind, and if you have lived with an attention disorder you have almost certainly used one and know exactly what it does.

Everything else

The other things you have to do do not vanish; they sit in the inbox, out of your head and off your shoulders, which is most of what capture is for. But they are not competing for the one slot that means today counted.