ADHD one task at a time: why only one main

Herding Chickens only lets you work on one task at a time. That's why we call it the main.

You can still have a big list. That's fine, and it's the point of capture: knowing nothing important is being forgotten is most of what makes a list worth keeping. But once your day starts, you set exactly one main. Not a top three. One.

Here's the reasoning.

The short version

Everything feels flat

For a lot of people living with ADHD, tasks arrive flat. They don't come with a sense of relative weight attached.

It isn't that you don't know some things matter more. At some level you know perfectly well. But knowing it in the abstract and having it available to you at 11am, three tabs into something, are different things.

Two opposite problems come out of that.

You go deep on the wrong thing. Something novel or interesting catches you, you drop into it properly, and you stay there for most of the day. The focus is real — hyperfocus is a genuine asset aimed at the right target. It just wasn't pointed anywhere that mattered.

I once spent most of a day reorganising the books on my bookcase. What I had actually wanted was one specific book, for one specific piece of information in it. Reorganising felt useful and relevant at first, and it isn't as though a tidy bookcase is worthless. But it had long outgrown its usefulness by the time I was four hours in.

I went looking for one book and ended up handling all of them, because once you're standing at the shelf every book is equally a candidate. That's the flatness again, operating on a smaller scale: there was a point where the tidying stopped being worth it, and I went straight past it without the ranking ever becoming available.

Or you go wide on everything. It feels like there are five hundred things to do, so you do a little on a lot of them. The needle barely moves, and you finish the day exhausted from chasing your tail.

📸 Screenshot placeholder — the Today view, showing a single main.

Both risks disappear the moment you slow down, look at the list intentionally, and pick one thing.

This isn't an argument against batching

Worth separating, because we've recommended the opposite elsewhere. Running a sprint — ten or twelve similar small tasks, five minutes each — is a good way to clear a stale pile, and it looks a lot like going wide.

The difference is that a sprint is chosen. It's bounded, batched by kind, timed, and for that stretch it is your main. Going wide is what happens instead of choosing.

Ask a different question

When you pick your main, the question to ask is not what is the most important thing? And it isn't what is the most urgent thing? Both of those invite you to argue with yourself.

There's also a case where the honest answer is the thing I've been circling for weeks — and if that task keeps losing to easier ones, the reason may be that you can't see its first step rather than that it isn't important.

Ask this instead:

What is one thing that, if I do it or make real progress on it today, will make it feel like a good day?

That question is answerable. It doesn't require you to rank twenty items against each other, and it routes around the fact that we all overpromise and overcommit.

It may take a while before one thing feels like enough.

The proof is in your own memory

Here's why I think one is enough, and you can check it yourself in about thirty seconds.

Think of a day in the past year when you felt genuinely happy, productive, fulfilled. Have it in mind.

Now: what made it feel that way?

You almost certainly aren't thinking well, there were these three things I got done. You're thinking of one thing. The one that made the day. And everything else you did that day — and you did do other things — has faded to irrelevance in hindsight.

That's evidence, from your own memory, that a good day was already built out of one thing. The hard part was never that one isn't enough. The hard part is doing it deliberately, going forwards, rather than noticing it afterwards.

Which is exactly what the app is for.

Switching is fine. Adding isn't.

So the constraint is deliberate.

You can change your main whenever you need to. Engage with it, discover there's information missing or you need someone else's input, and swap it. That's not failure — you made real progress by finding out, and there's no shame in it. 🔄 Change main exists for precisely that.

You can only have one. The app deliberately doesn't let you set a second. Not because two is unmanageable, but because "I'll do both" is how the ranking gets lost again, and you already know where that day ends.

And if you finish your main and keep going? Good. That's a bonus, not a second main — the app won't ask you to declare it as one, and nothing is measured against it. Bonuses are welcome and never required, and they're worth noticing when they happen.

Try it today

Think of that day again. The one you felt good about. Find the one thing that made it.

Then use that same feeling to choose today's main — not the most urgent thing, not the most defensible thing. The one that would make today feel like that.

Everything else can wait on the list, which is what the list is for. Some of it can come off entirely, and some of it should have been a no in the first place.

The first version runs in Telegram; there's no store download yet. Join the waitlist for a launch email.

Keep reading

• ADHD people-pleasing: make “no” your default
• If ADHD stops you from boring tasks, try a 5-minute sprint
• ADHD executive dysfunction: the harder route you take to avoid the hard thing
• Welcome to the Herding Chickens blog
• More on Focus & Environment

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Herding Chickens is a productivity app in development, not medical advice, therapy, or an ADHD diagnosis. If you are struggling, talk to a qualified clinician. In the UK, start with the NHS ADHD in adults page.