The Threshold
Every new task gets a conviction score from 0 to 100. Below 90, the app stops you and asks whether it really deserves room — and offers Discard first, not last.
Finite by design
A planner that tells you to stop.
Every other to-do app is a bucket with no bottom. You add, and add, and the list quietly becomes a record of everything you are failing to do. Fallow does the opposite: it holds three things, questions the fourth, and shuts the day when the day is over.
Accounts are created by your administrator — there is no sign-up form, and nothing to cancel.
The premise
You will not get to the bottom of the list.
Not because you are disorganised — because the list is infinite and you are not. Once you accept that, planning stops being about squeezing more in and starts being about choosing well.
Our first rule
A day has edges. Work will expand until something stops it, so something here has to stop it.
Our second rule
Rest is not what's left over once the work is done. The work is never done, so rest goes in first.
Fallow is an independent product. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to any productivity programme.
How it works
Five constraints, doing all the work.
A hard limit of three
The Today column physically refuses a fourth task. Not a warning you can click past — the card will not drop. Finish something or let it go first.
123
4
Three is the ceiling.
True time, not hoped-for time
You say sixty minutes. You have always meant ninety. Every estimate is widened by half again and shown that way, so the day you plan is the day you actually get.
60 mins
90 mins (true time)
Rest is scheduled first
Rest and joy get their own blocks, booked like meetings. If the day has none, the planner says so — gently, once, without a red badge or a guilt streak.
17:30 · Walk without headphones · 45 mins
The Handoff
One button closes the day and asks the only question that helps: what are you leaving ready for tomorrow? Then the board empties, and you are finished.
Leaving ready for tomorrow…
Shoes by the door.
Boundaries, in the form itself
Before anything is added, one question has to be answered: whose job is this, really? What never makes it onto the board is where most of the benefit lives.
Who it's for
People who are good at their work and bad at stopping.
If your list is long because you are capable, not because you are lazy, this is built for you. It will not help you do more. It is not trying to.
- You finish the day unsure what you actually did
- Your estimates are honest and still always wrong
- You say yes quickly and regret it slowly
- Rest is what happens if there's time left, and there never is
- Your to-do app has become a monument to guilt
Under the hood
Deliberately small.
No framework, no build step, no dependency to update at midnight. It is the same discipline as the product itself.
- PHPserver & API
- Vanilla JSno framework
Three things. Then quiet.
That is the whole product. It fits on a business card because it has to.
Open the planner