Design notes

Why our to-do app refuses to hold more than ten tasks

August 5, 2026 · The Airus Solutions team

Every to-do app we've ever used got worse the longer we used it. Not because the app changed — because the list did. It grew. Somewhere around item forty, a to-do list stops being a plan and becomes a worry list: a scrolling record of everything you're behind on, growing faster than you can work.

First10 To-Do, now on the App Store, is our answer. It gives you ten slots. That's the whole app. To add an eleventh task, you finish something — or you admit it doesn't matter and drop it. Either way, the list stays the size of an actual day.

The cap is the feature

Most productivity apps compete on capacity: more projects, more tags, more nesting. First10 competes on the opposite axis. When the list can't grow, three things happen:

• Every item earns its place. Adding a task now has a cost, so "someday maybe" noise never makes it in.
• Triage happens at the door. The finish-or-drop decision you've been deferring for weeks happens in the moment, while it's small.
• "Done" stays within reach. A progress ring counting seven of ten reads as almost there. A backlog of two hundred reads as why bother.

A familiar number

If "first ten" sounds familiar, it's the same idea behind our step tracker first10steps: the hardest part of anything is the first small unit of it. A walk starts with ten steps; a day starts with ten tasks that actually matter. It's becoming a studio philosophy — momentum comes from finishing small things, not from cataloguing big ones.

A list you never finish isn't a plan. It's a worry list with a user interface.

Private by default

First10 has no account, no sign-up, no servers and no tracking — your tasks live on your iPhone and nowhere else. There was nothing to sync because there's nothing we want to know. Fast, focused, finite.