Finalist on iPhone — the day’s list is exactly the day’s list, with arrows marking what carried over from yesterday.

A planner app whose entire pitch is what it refuses to do. After the day starts you can’t add to it; whatever didn’t get done carries forward to tomorrow with an arrow in front of it, intact.

Most planning apps treat your list as an infinite append-only log: type a thing, it goes in, the list grows. The implicit rule is that whatever you can think of, you can promise yourself you’ll do. Finalist is the inverse. The day’s list is fixed at start-of-day, and the only operations after that are do and defer. There is no “actually, also this.” The constraint is the feature.

The model is borrowed wholesale from a paper-planner discipline — Bullet Journal-adjacent, but tighter. Yesterday’s incomplete items show up in today’s list with a leading arrow (›) to mark them as carry-forwards, the way a paper user would migrate them by hand. The arrow is small but does serious work: an item carried four days running is visible as such, which forces a decision — do it, schedule it, or admit it’s not happening and delete it. The app makes the friction of that admission small enough that you actually do it.

Available on iPhone, iPad, and Mac with the same view across all three; sync is iCloud-based, no account required. The interface is deliberately plain — a list, a date, an arrow column — so the constraint stays the visible feature rather than getting buried under typography.

Honest limitation: this only works if the underlying discipline matches your temperament. If you genuinely use today’s list as a place to capture every passing thought as it arrives, Finalist will fight you. It’s built for the user who wants the app to fight them about that exact habit. For the rest of us, it’s a quiet nudge in the right direction every morning.