Ready Time
You know what you need to do. Ready Time tells you when.
Most morning routine charts list the steps and leave the timing blank. This one works backward from the time you have to be out the door, so every step carries a start time. Copy it, change the numbers to match your morning, and it’s yours.
Ready Time
You know what you need to do. Ready Time tells you when.
A list gets you the steps. What it leaves out is when each one has to begin, and that’s the number you need at 7:15 with wet hair. A start time next to “get dressed” gives you something to check the wall clock against.
The need for that outside reference is well documented: a 2021 meta-analysis of 55 studies found consistent differences in how accurately people with ADHD judge time intervals.
Start at the end. Write down the time you actually have to leave, then work up the list subtracting each step. The time you land on is your start time, and it is usually earlier than you expected. That gap is the reason the chart is worth making at all.
“Get ready” hides five steps inside one line. Charts fall apart on the vague entries, because a vague entry has no honest duration and nothing to check yourself against. Shower, dressed, breakfast, meds, bag: each of those you can time, and each one gives you a place to notice you’re running behind.
A printed chart on the fridge works on the mornings you look at the fridge. Ready Time takes the same chart and sends a notification as each step comes due, so following it doesn’t depend on checking it.
Eight in the morning at the bottom, a quarter to seven at the top. Seventy-five minutes of steps, which is more than most people would guess before adding them up. That is the number the chart exists to show you.
Every step, a duration for each one, and a start time computed from the end. The durations are the part people leave out, and they’re the part that matters. Be generous with the estimates, because the honest number is usually bigger than the remembered one. Without durations you have a list of steps and no way to tell whether you’re behind.
Write the time you have to be out the door at the bottom of the page. List the steps above it in the order you do them. Put an honest duration next to each. Then add the durations upward from the deadline to get a start time for every row. The first row is when your morning actually begins.
The chart above works as one: copy the rows, swap in your own steps and durations, and rewrite the times from your own out-the-door time. Printing it is fine. Paper works on the mornings you look at it.
Usually earlier than it feels like it should be. Add every duration between the first step and the deadline, subtract that total from your leave time, and start there. In the chart above that comes to an hour and fifteen minutes before you have to leave.
The arithmetic is the same, and a chart on the wall gives a kid something to follow on their own. Expect the durations to be longer than yours, and expect them to be wrong the first few times. Run it for a week and adjust whatever was optimistic. If they have a phone of their own, you can send them the plan and they get their own alerts for every step, so the reminding doesn’t all have to come from you.
If the timing is the part that keeps slipping, see time blindness, or work back from the alarm with the wake-up time calculator.
Morning routines to start from