Get an alert for each step. Ready Time does the math and tells you when to start, so everything is ready at once.
Ready Time
You know what you need to do. Ready Time helps you know when to start.
Forward planning asks what you'll do next. Backward planning asks what has to be ready by 6:30, then works down the list until it arrives at right now.
Backward plans to start from
Get an alert for each step. Ready Time does the math and tells you when to start, so everything is ready at once.
Ready Time
You know what you need to do. Ready Time helps you know when to start.
You start at the end. Dinner on the table at 6:30. Then you subtract, in reverse order: fifteen minutes to plate and set the table, so that starts at 6:15. Forty minutes in the oven, so it goes in at 5:35. Twenty-five minutes of prep, so the knife comes out at 5:10. Keep going until you hit a time that has already passed. That start time is your answer, and often the reason things feel rushed.
Project schedulers have done this for decades under the name reverse scheduling: fix the delivery date, work back through the dependencies, find the latest possible start for each one. It's the backward pass in the critical path method. On the scale of a single evening it's the same idea, and it's what separates “I have plenty of time” from “the oven needed to be on eleven minutes ago.”
A forward plan is a list in the order you feel like doing things. Each step begins when the last one ends, so every overrun quietly pushes the finish later. You often don't find out until the end, when the finish line is the one thing that couldn't move.
A backward plan flips who absorbs the slip. The deadline stays fixed, so an overrun shows up as soon as it happens: a start time you have already passed. That can feel uncomfortable, and it's useful: you see the slip at 5:20 while you can still cut something, not at 6:45 when guests are in the hallway.
Nobody struggles to subtract twenty-five minutes from 6:30. The hard part is doing it for every step, in your head, while also cooking, and then doing it again when the roast needs another fifteen minutes, or the meeting moves, or you decide to shower first after all.
That recalculating is what software is good at. When one step changes, the start times behind it move on their own, and you can keep cooking.
Set the deadline. Add the steps and how long each one takes. Ready Time subtracts backward through the list and gives every step a start time, then alerts you at each one so you're not the timekeeper.
Change anything (a longer step, an earlier deadline) and the whole plan recomputes. The Premium unlock adds Time Lock, which pins one step to a fixed clock time and arranges everything else around it, and buffers, which put a little breathing room between steps so a plan isn't wall-to-wall.
Read from the bottom and it's the same reasoning you'd use by hand. Read from the top and it's a schedule with alerts attached. Backward planning just asks you to work it out in that order before you commit to it.
Get a nudge at the right moment, while there's still time to act.
Each step gets its own alert, so you know what's next and how long you have.
“A key part of my planning process. Well worth the investment.”App Store review
Planning that starts at the finish and works back to the present. You fix the moment something has to be done, subtract each step that has to happen first, and end up with the latest time you can start each one. You get a set of start times, not just a to-do list.
Write down the deadline first. List every step that has to happen before it, including the ones that aren't the main event: showering, driving, parking, finding your keys. Give each one an honest duration: measured, not remembered. Then subtract them from the deadline in reverse order. The first start time you land on is when the whole thing has to begin.
Mostly the setting. Reverse scheduling is what project managers call it when a delivery date is fixed and the plan is built back through the dependencies, The critical path method calls it the backward pass. Backward planning is the same math applied to a personal deadline. Both answer the same question: what is the latest I can start and still finish on time?
That's what Ready Time is for. You enter the deadline and the steps, and it computes a start time for each one and alerts you when they arrive. Most planners and calendars work the other way (you choose the start times yourself and they show you the result), which leaves the backward math to you.
Enough that a normal amount of friction doesn't eat the whole plan. A good way to size it is to run the plan once as written and notice where it went wrong: the step you underestimated, or the gap between steps where nothing was scheduled and ten minutes vanished anyway. Buffers between steps are part of the Premium unlock if you'd rather have them built in than padded into each estimate.
Timeboxing apps come at this from the other direction. See Ready Time vs. Structured, or all app comparisons.
Ready Time
You know what you need to do. Ready Time helps you know when to start.
