Notes on Doing Focus
Doing Focus: A To-Do App That Only Shows You the Next Task
Here's something I noticed about my own productivity system: I'd open my task manager in the morning, see 30+ items staring back at me, and immediately feel behind. Before I'd done a single thing, I was already overwhelmed.
The list wasn't the problem. I needed the list. The problem was seeing all of it at once.
That's why I built Doing Focus.
The idea
Doing Focus is a macOS app with a very specific job. You load your to-do list into it — everything you need to do — and then it hides most of it. What you see is just the next task. One thing. The thing you should be doing right now.
Finish it, and the next one appears. That's basically the whole interaction.
It sounds almost too simple to be a product. I thought so too, until I started using it and realised I was getting through my days without that familiar mid-afternoon feeling of "I have no idea what to work on next" followed by 20 minutes of scrolling through tasks trying to decide.
Why most task managers make things worse
Task management software has a feature problem. Every app wants to be the operating system for your entire life. Projects, sub-projects, tags, priorities, due dates, recurring tasks, Kanban boards, Gantt charts, calendar integrations, team collaboration, AI-powered suggestions for what you should do next.
All of those features are defensible individually. Together, they create a system that requires more management than the work it's supposed to organise.
I've used most of them over the years. Todoist, Things, OmniFocus, Notion, Asana, plain text files, post-it notes on my monitor. They all eventually hit the same wall: the tool becomes another source of cognitive load instead of reducing it.
The uncomfortable truth is that knowing what to do next is rarely the bottleneck. Most of us know what we should be working on. The bottleneck is committing to one thing and actually doing it — without the entire rest of your list whispering in the background.
How it works in practice
You open Doing Focus in the morning. You either type in your tasks for the day or pull them in from wherever you keep them. You drag them into the order you want. Then you start.
The app shows you task one. Just task one. No sidebar of other tasks. No badge telling you how many remain. You do the thing, you mark it done, you see the next one.
Some days I put three things in. Some days twelve. The number doesn't matter because I never see the number — I just see what's in front of me.
There's something almost physical about the relief of not seeing the full list. It's the same reason some people cover exam questions with a sheet of paper and only reveal them one at a time. Your brain stops trying to solve everything simultaneously and focuses on the one thing it can actually do right now.
Who it's for
Doing Focus isn't for project managers tracking a team of 15 across multiple workstreams. There are good tools for that, and this isn't one of them.
It's for the person who already knows what they need to do today but keeps getting paralysed by the volume. The freelancer with six client projects who wastes the first hour of every day triaging instead of working. The developer who has a clear sprint but can't stop mentally cycling through all the tickets. The founder who wrote a beautiful to-do list last night and woke up feeling crushed by it.
If your problem is "I don't know what to do," Doing Focus won't help. If your problem is "I know exactly what to do but I can't seem to start," it might be exactly what you need.
The philosophy underneath
There's a broader idea behind this app that runs through everything I build: showing less is a feature. Not a compromise, not a limitation, not an MVP that'll eventually grow up into a "real" product. Less is the point.
Your attention is finite. Software that demands more of it than necessary is badly designed — no matter how many features it has. Doing Focus demands almost none. You open it, you see your task, you do your task. That's the whole relationship.
Try it
Doing Focus is available for macOS. You can download it and see if the single-task approach works for your brain the way it works for mine.
It won't work for everyone. That's fine. But if you've ever stared at a full to-do list and felt your motivation evaporate, give it a shot.