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Tonight
The dinner decider. One question, then only the meals that fit the energy you actually have — from a short rotation you already know how to cook.
Why the deciding is the hard part
“Make dinner” is not one task. It is a stack of jobs wearing a trench coat — decide, plan, shop, prep, cook, clean — and any one of them can stall the whole chain. The link that breaks most often is the first one, and it breaks at the worst hour of the day, when the deciding has to happen on the least fuel.
Almost every app built for this responds by offering more: more recipes, more suggestions, more inspiration. For a brain that is already out of capacity, more options are not the cure. They are the problem, rendered in a nicer typeface.
Tonight goes the other way. It holds a handful of meals you already know how to make, and on any given evening it shows you fewer of them, not more.
How it works
- 1
Answer one question. How much have you got tonight? Three answers, no scale from one to ten, no mood tracking.
- 2
See only what fits. On a low night the medium meals are not greyed out, they are simply not there. Nothing to resist.
- 3
Cook one step at a time. One instruction per screen, with the ingredients that step needs repeated in it, so losing your place costs nothing.
- 4
Or do not cook at all. The fallback list is one tap away from every screen, including mid-cook when the plan collapses.
FAQ
What is Tonight?
Tonight is a free dinner decider. Instead of planning a week in advance, it asks one question at the moment the problem actually arrives - how much energy have you got tonight - and then shows only the meals from your own short rotation that fit that answer. Pick one and it walks you through it a step at a time.
How is this different from a meal planner?
A meal planner asks you on Sunday to predict what Thursday-you will feel like cooking. Tonight makes no prediction and has no calendar, so there is no day to fall behind on and nothing to abandon. It is a short menu you choose from in the moment, sorted by how much capacity a meal actually costs.
Do I have to enter my own recipes before it works?
No. The three questions at the start build you a starter rotation of real meals straight away, so the app is useful on the first evening. You are expected to swap most of them within a fortnight - correcting a list is far easier than writing one from nothing.
Why only a handful of meals?
Because a long list is another decision, and deciding is the part that fails. A short rotation turns an open-ended question into a pick-one choice, which is the kind of decision an overloaded brain can still make. It also makes the shopping list nearly identical week to week.
What happens on a night when I cannot cook at all?
Answer “none at all” and it goes straight to your fallback list - three to five things you can eat with no thinking, written in advance on a day you had capacity. If you already made a chaos fallback card on this site, Tonight uses that list automatically.
Is there a streak?
No, deliberately. Tonight counts the nights you ate this month and that number only ever goes up. A streak turns one hard week into evidence that you failed, which is exactly the mechanism that ends most food systems by about week three.
Does it need an account, and where is my data?
No account and no signup. Your rotation, your list and your count are saved in your own browser and nowhere else. Nothing you type is sent to a server or to analytics. Clearing your browser data clears the app.
Is this only for people with ADHD?
It was built for ADHD brains, where the deciding stage fails hardest and most visibly. The problem itself is not exclusive - deciding what to eat is the part most households find hardest - so the tool works for anyone who is tired of answering the same question at the worst hour of the day.
The rest of the system
- The chaos fallback card — write the list Tonight falls back to. Free, two minutes.
- ADHD meal planning for people who hate meal planning — the article this whole thing came out of.
- 15 low-energy meals — if you are stuck for what to put in your rotation.
- All the free ADHD tools
Tonight is a free self-help tool from ADHD Pearls. It is not medical or nutritional advice and does not diagnose or treat any condition.