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.
Eat the Frog is an iPhone list for only the things you’ve been putting off. Each one is a frog in your pond. Pick tomorrow’s the night before, and eat 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.
Where the frog came from
- 1795
It starts as a toad. In Nicolas Chamfort’s Maximes et pensées:
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.
- Since
Retold for two centuries, the toad turned into a frog, and the line got pinned on Mark Twain:
Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.
There’s no sign he ever wrote it. - 2001
Brian Tracy’s Eat That Frog! turns the line into a habit: do the biggest, most dreaded thing first, before anything else gets a chance.
- Now
This app keeps the frog and adds a pond: one dreaded thing a day, picked the night before.
What it does
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Keeps one plain list
Everything you’re avoiding goes in one pond, and the pond is a short list with today’s frog on top. Each frog’s dot gets darker as its drop-dead date gets close, and each one says why it’s where it is.
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Nudges only when nothing’s picked
If tomorrow has no frog by evening, or today has none by morning, you get one reminder: got some spare time? The pond is right there. Writing down a specific plan at bedtime helps people fall asleep faster.2
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Starts with a first bite
Each frog 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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Doesn’t forgive the frog
Pick a frog for a day and skip it, and it grows. Its time estimate stays honest, but 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 frogs are smaller than they look.3
Frogs that come back
Taxes, the car registration, the smoke-alarm batteries. Mark a frog monthly or yearly and it waits out of sight, then hops back into the pond 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 frog is chosen ahead of time, so the morning has no decision in it, and the gulp screen keeps the record of how much smaller each frog was than it looked.
- Steel, P. (2007). The nature of procrastination. Psychological Bulletin, 133(1).
- 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
Eat the Frog 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 frogs stay on your phone.