One dreaded thing a day.
Every to-do app ends up as a list of the easy things, done, and the hard things, moved to tomorrow. This one only holds the hard things, and only asks for one a day.
Swallow the Toad is an iPhone list for only the things you’ve been putting off. Each one is a toad, hiding under its own stone in your garden. Pick tomorrow’s the night before, and swallow one a day. Do one sucky thing a day and you have fewer sucky things to worry about.
Invite link: ••••••
iPhone with iOS 26. Opens Apple’s TestFlight app; install that first if you don’t have it.
“M. de Lassay… said that one should swallow a toad every morning, in order to find nothing else disgusting for the rest of the day, when one has to spend it in society.”
Nicolas Chamfort, Maximes et pensées, 1795. The original of “eat the frog”: centuries of retelling turned the toad into a frog.
What it does
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Keeps a garden, not a list
Everything you’re avoiding is a toad under a stone, all in one garden. Bigger stones take longer. They turn yellow, then red, as their drop-dead date gets close, and each one says why it’s where it is.
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Picks tomorrow’s toad tonight
One nudge in the evening: did you swallow a toad today, and which one is tomorrow’s? Writing down a specific plan at bedtime helps people fall asleep faster.3
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Starts with a first bite
Each toad gets the smallest possible first step. For the vague ones, “Break it up” splits the task into bites with Apple’s on-device model. Nothing leaves your phone.
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Forgives the streak
Any toad swallowed counts for the day, and two rest days a week cover the days that go sideways. Goals with a little slack get more people back on track after a miss.2
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Doesn’t forgive the toad
Pick a toad for a day and skip it, and it grows. Its time estimate stays honest, but its stone gets bigger and it climbs the list. After three skips the app asks whether it needs breaking up.
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Measures the dread
When you’re done: how many days you dreaded it, how long it actually took, and how bad it really was. Most toads are smaller than they look.4
Toads that come back
Taxes, the car registration, the smoke-alarm batteries. Mark a toad monthly or yearly and it waits out of sight, then crawls back into the garden a few days before it’s due. A twelve-month view shows what’s coming.
Three screens
Why it works
Putting things off isn’t laziness. It’s a predictable trade: the task feels worse the further away its reward is, and the vaguer and more boring it is.1 The app shrinks those parts. A first bite makes the task concrete. Tomorrow’s toad is chosen ahead of time, so the morning has no decision in it. The streak has slack so one bad day doesn’t end it, and the gulp screen keeps the record of how much smaller each toad was than it looked.
- Steel, P. (2007). The nature of procrastination. Psychological Bulletin, 133(1).
- Sharif, M. & Shu, S. (2021). Nudging persistence after failure through emergency reserves. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.
- Scullin, M. et al. (2018). The effects of bedtime writing on difficulty falling asleep. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 147(1).
- Berns, G. et al. (2006). Neurobiological substrates of dread. Science, 312(5774).
Trying it
Swallow the Toad is in TestFlight for friends. Tap the invitation link (••••••; ask Mark for the username and password to reveal it) on your iPhone, install the app, and TestFlight brings you each new build. The beta holds 25 people.
It needs iOS 26. “Break it up” needs an iPhone that runs Apple Intelligence; on other phones that button simply isn’t there. Your toads stay on your phone.