A to-do list
your phone obeys.

The problem with a normal to-do list

A to-do list has no authority. It sits in an app, politely, next to the apps that are genuinely trying to hold your attention, and it loses. Nothing happens when you ignore it. Nothing happens when you write it. The whole arrangement runs on you feeling like doing the thing, which is exactly the resource in short supply.

Meanwhile the phone in your hand has real authority over your day. It decides what you see first, what interrupts you, what is one tap away. The list asks. The phone tells.

So swap them. Let the list tell and the phone ask. That is the sentence, and the rest of this page is how it works in practice.

How the day runs

The day starts blocked. The apps you picked are shut from midnight, before you have decided anything, before you are tired, before the first scroll has a chance to set the shape of the morning. You did not have to be strong at seven in the morning, because the decision was made the calm way, once.

You write the day. One to three tasks, no more. Set them the night before or over the first coffee. Three is the cap on purpose: a list of twelve is a way of deciding nothing.

Done mints a pass. One finished task is one thirty minute pass. Before it counts, you answer one honest question about it. Nobody checks the answer. That is the point, and it is covered in why app blockers fail: a tool you can lie to is a tool you can be honest with.

Passes bank, up to five. Spending one is deliberate. You are asked what it is for, the apps open for thirty minutes, and then they shut again quietly. An unspent pass at the end of the day is not waste. It is the app losing, which is the app working.

The evening bell. At an hour you choose, the day is read back to you in your own words: what you wrote, what you finished, what you said about it. Then the day is sealed and tomorrow starts blocked again.

Two numbers, and no others

There is a streak, which is the number of days you did at least one thing. There is a wallet, which is how many passes you are holding. That is all. No weekly average that goes up when you are ill, no graph of your worst hours, no score to game.

The reason is simple. A number you can move without doing anything real is a number that will eventually be the reason you open the app. Two honest numbers are harder to lie to than twelve interesting ones.

What it is not

It is not a lock you cannot open. You can turn it off. ScrollBuddy holds no key you cannot take back, and it only ever knows what you tell it. It is not a coach that watches you: blocking runs on Apple’s Screen Time permission, so ScrollBuddy never sees which apps you open or what you do inside them. No account and no login. Your tasks, your answers and your day count stay on your phone.

It is one person’s attempt at the smallest tool that actually holds. If a pause before the app is enough for you, one of the lighter apps in screen time apps compared will serve you better and cost you less. This one is for the day after the pause stopped working.

Questions