Ready Time
You know what you need to do. Ready Time tells you when.
Boarding at Minneapolis-Saint Paul International is a deadline that doesn't move. Set your real boarding time below, fix the drive and the steps, and read off when to leave — and when to start packing.
Every row is editable: tap the boarding time or any duration and the whole plan recomputes backward. The first travel row — drive, ride, or train — is your leave-by time; the top row is when the trip actually starts.
The 20-minute drive is a typical run from Minneapolis without traffic. Check the real drive to MSP at the hour you’ll actually leave, then put that number in.
Ready Time
You know what you need to do. Ready Time tells you when.
The Blue Line light rail serves both terminals from downtown Minneapolis. Drives are short and mostly reliable by big-city standards; winter storm days are the exception and they deserve a different plan entirely.
The moving targets — today’s security waits, parking availability, terminal maps — live on the official MSP site. This page covers the part that doesn’t change: the backward arithmetic from boarding.
Every airport tells you when to arrive. None of them tell you when to get in the shower, and that's the number that decides whether the morning is calm or a scramble. The plan above keeps subtracting past the drive — through packing, through getting ready — until it lands on a start time you can actually act on.
That's what Ready Time does for the whole trip: set boarding as the deadline, list the real steps, and get an alert when each one is due to start. It can even pick the flight up from your calendar.
Two hours before a domestic departure is the sensible default, three for international. Shave it only on routes and hours you know firsthand. MSP has two terminals that are not walkable to each other and are served by different exits — confirming Terminal 1 vs Terminal 2 is the single most important minute of planning here.
Terminal 1 (the majority of flights) runs several checkpoints and its tram-connected concourses stretch a long way; Terminal 2 is compact. The Metro Transit light rail connects the two if you guess wrong, but it's a real detour with luggage. Whatever wait you've heard about, treat the 25-minute security row in the plan above as a default to edit, not a promise: TSA PreCheck reliably shrinks it, and a checked bag reliably grows the step before it.
Mostly at the front of the chain. International check-in usually means the airline desk rather than a kiosk — documents get checked, and counters often close an hour before departure — and boarding opens earlier relative to takeoff. Choose “check-in desk” above the plan, give that row room, and take the boarding time from your boarding pass instead of guessing backward from departure. The same choice covers anyone the kiosk can't help: lap infants, unaccompanied minors, oversized bags.
Work backward from boarding, in order: time at the gate, the walk, security, bag drop, parking, then the drive — 20 minutes in the default plan, which you should replace with your route at the hour you'll actually drive it. The calculator above runs the subtraction; the leave-by moment is the first travel row — "Drive to MSP" in the default plan.
That's Ready Time's whole job. Build this plan once in the app and every step gets its own notification at its start time — start packing, leave now, you're at security's mercy from here. It can detect flights from your calendar, and the alerts carry the countdown to boarding.
Not flying? The generic leave time calculator does the same math for any appointment, and the wake-up time calculator runs it all the way back to the alarm.
Ready Time
You know what you need to do. Ready Time tells you when.
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Plans for the rest of the trip