I went looking for a to do list app that resets every day because the phrase kept showing up in autocomplete next to unrelated searches. On October 20, 2026 I ran it through Google’s autocomplete (the firefox client, English, US) from several seed phrases. “to do list app that resets every day” came back as an exact suggestion under the broad seed “to do list app that,” and again as the top result when I narrowed the seed to “to do list app that resets.” Two independent seeds landing on the same long-tail phrase is a stronger signal than one lucky guess, even without a volume number attached to it.
So I opened the pages that answer that search directly: Microsoft To Do’s own support page for its “My Day” feature, the App Store listing for DailyList, the Product Hunt listing for Sortyd, a GummySearch aggregation of Reddit to do app reviews, and I tried the Chrome Web Store listing for a “ToDo List Reset” extension, which returned only navigation chrome to my fetch, so I am not citing its description as a verified source.
A to do list app that resets every day is already a real, shipped feature
Read under this heading: a to do list app that resets every day is not a niche request. Microsoft To Do’s My Day is a smart list that clears itself nightly, pitched as “a blank slate” each morning. DailyList, on the App Store, is a single-day list that focuses you on one task at a time and markets “start fresh every day” as its core idea, alongside a daily completion rate and productivity stats. Sortyd, a paid planner with an AI coach that reads Apple Health data, says its lists “reset every night to give users a fresh start each day,” explicitly framing this as removing guilt and pressure from habit building.
Three different products, the same promise: midnight comes, the list clears, you start clean. That promise is popular enough that it shows up independently across apps built for very different audiences, from a free single-screen list to a paid AI-coached planner.
None of them say where the unfinished task goes
Here is what none of the three descriptions state plainly: what happens to the task you did not finish. “Start fresh” and “wipes clean” are consistent with two very different outcomes, delete the task outright, or carry it somewhere you have to go find, and the copy does not distinguish between them.
Microsoft’s own support page is the one exception that actually answers the question, and the answer is not a full reset either: “Any tasks in My Day that aren’t completed before the list resets will be saved to your Tasks list,” then surfaced again as a suggestion the next day. So the task survives, but it moves out of the list you were looking at into a separate tray you have to open and act on. A real complaint I found, surfaced through a GummySearch aggregation of Reddit reviews, is exactly about this gap: a Microsoft To Do user wrote that an “overdue task doesn’t come in my day view default,” meaning the thing you didn’t finish can sit unseen unless you remember to go look for it. The same aggregation collected praise for the opposite design, apps where reviewers specifically liked that “tasks carry on to the next day” automatically, with no separate tray to check.
DailyList makes the ambiguity worse by mixing its messages. The same listing that pitches a daily fresh start also tracks “achievement badges,” and its own release notes for version 1.1.0 mention “task and streak achievements” and an “animated streak badge.” A streak is the opposite of a fresh start: it is a running count that breaks the moment you miss a day, which is precisely the pressure a reset is supposed to remove. Sortyd avoids that particular contradiction, its pitch is built around no guilt or pressure, but its listing simply does not say what happens to an incomplete item at the reset. “Wipes clean” could mean the task is gone, or it could mean it reappears tomorrow; a reader cannot tell which from the page itself.
What I built instead, and where it falls short
This is the part where I say plainly that I built the app I am about to describe, so judge the comparison accordingly. DreamStore resets the way of looking at each day without deleting or hiding what you skipped.
A one-off todo you did not finish shows up again automatically, at the top of today’s list, marked as carried over rather than marked wrong. It is not a streak, and nothing about it counts down or breaks: DreamStore has no streaks at all, a design choice I wrote about separately in a post about removing streaks entirely. The current Google Play listing states the same idea from the other direction: “The days you skip are not counted. Only the days you show up are.” Growth stages for the small planet at the center of the screen that reacts to each completed todo never move backwards either, so there is no number that resets to zero because yesterday went badly, which is the exact opposite of a midnight wipe.
I have not measured whether seeing yesterday’s unfinished task at the top of today’s list, softly marked, actually gets people to finish it more often than a design that hides it in a separate tray or deletes it outright. That would need real usage data comparing both approaches, and I do not have it. What I can say is that the two failure modes I found in other listings, a task that silently disappears, and a task that survives but moves somewhere you have to remember to check, are both avoided by putting it back in front of you without punishing you for having missed it.
Where this does not fit: if what you actually want is a list that is empty again every single morning, with zero trace of yesterday, DreamStore will not give you that; a carried-over task shows up until you finish it or it ages out, not before. DreamStore runs on Android and iPhone, and the free tier runs ads; on Android a Pro subscription removes them and adds more planet decoration slots, a full year of stats, extra widget colors, and higher video and AI limits. The app also leans toward saying a plan out loud (“bank call tomorrow at two, run at seven, twenty pages of the book”) rather than typing into a grid, which will not suit everyone’s workflow.
More on the photo and video side of the same todo list is in a post about to do apps with photo diaries.
What I checked, and what I did not
As of October 2026, I read Microsoft’s own support page for My Day directly, the App Store listing for DailyList, and the Product Hunt listing for Sortyd. I also read a GummySearch page aggregating Reddit reviews across several to do apps, which is a secondhand aggregation rather than the original Reddit threads, so I am flagging it as a weaker source than the three listings I opened myself. I tried to read the Chrome Web Store listing for a “ToDo List Reset” extension and could not retrieve its description text, so I did not cite any claim from it.
I did not install any of the apps above, so I cannot speak to how the daily reset actually feels in use, only to what each page states about it. I also found no study comparing deletion, a separate suggestions tray, and automatic soft carryover as three ways of handling an unfinished task; what I wrote about which design helps people actually finish the task is my own reasoning from the gap in these listings, not a measured result.
DreamStore’s own facts above (the carryover behavior, the no-streak design, pricing) are current as of the Google Play listing read on October 20, 2026, last updated by the developer on October 14, 2026.