I've tried a lot of to-do apps. I never stuck with a single one — the abandoned ones are, by now, their own kind of backlog, which I am also ignoring.
For a long time I assumed the problem was me — no discipline, too many apps, the usual. But I think the real reason is subtler: a digital to-do app keeps everything. Every task you type is saved, indefinitely, and searchable later. And somewhere in the back of my mind, that permanence quietly turned each quick note into a small commitment. If it's going to live forever and I might scroll back through it someday, I'd better phrase it properly, file it under the right project, keep the list tidy. So the list became a thing to maintain — and maintaining it was exactly the chore I was trying to avoid. Eventually I'd just stop.
Paper sticky notes never did that to me. You grab one, scribble the thing, slap it on the monitor, do it, and throw it away. Nothing remains. Change your mind halfway through? Crumple it — gone. There's no inbox quietly filling up with everything you didn't get to, and no archive sitting in the corner judging your life choices. The whole life of a sticky note is: write it, do it, toss it.
So I built the digital version of that. It's called TossDo, and v0.1.0 is out.
It's a whiteboard that fills your browser window. You write a task on a blank sticky, it sticks to the board, and when you're done you toss it — a real, permanent delete. There's no "completed" list, no history, no search, nothing kept. The schema doesn't even have a done or archived column; tossing a note is a genuine delete, not the polite fiction of flipping archived to true and quietly keeping the row forever. Nothing remains, on purpose.
The notes are a fixed size, and they fill up like real ones — when a sticky is physically full, you're out of room. That constraint is the feature: a sticky note makes you say the thing in the space you've got, not file a five-part epic with acceptance criteria.
Like everything I've been building lately, it's local-first: your notes live in a single SQLite file on your own machine. No account, no cloud, no sync, no telemetry. (It also, at long last, saves me money on actual sticky notes.)
v0.1.0 runs from source — you'll need Elixir installed for now (sorry), and one-command installers are coming. It's open source on Codeberg, MIT licensed.
If your to-do app has quietly become another inbox you're avoiding, maybe try the one you're meant to throw away. It asks nothing of you and remembers even less.