Ready Time
You know what you need to do. Ready Time helps you know when to start.
Ask around and you'll hear anything from fifteen minutes to two hours. An average can't set your alarm. Your own number can, and one measured morning is enough to find it.
Ready Time
You know what you need to do. Ready Time helps you know when to start.
People ask this when they're setting an alarm: if a normal person takes 45 minutes, then 45 minutes should be enough. But mornings vary wildly. A shower and a shirt is a different morning from hair, breakfast for three, and a dog. Whatever the average is, it probably isn't yours.
There's another reason the question comes up. Most people suspect the number in their head is optimistic, and they're usually right. You remember your best morning. The morning you actually have is the ordinary one.
Start a timer when the alarm goes off and stop it when you close the front door. Don't change the routine for the measurement, or you'll just measure a better morning than the ones you usually have. Count everything: the minutes before you actually get up, the second coffee, the hunt for keys.
The measured total is nearly always longer than the guess. The shower takes the ten minutes you thought. What takes longer is everything between steps: getting from the shower to dressed, finding the bag, deciding whether you need a jacket.
The fifteen-minute mornings people ask about are real. They're built the evening before. Clothes chosen, bag packed, lunch made, shower taken at night: each of those is a step that no longer has to happen in the morning, which buys more time than rushing the same step under a clock.
What stays in the morning is a short, fixed sequence. Four steps with real durations are easier to stick to than a vague hour that starts whenever you put the phone down.
This morning takes an hour and five minutes. Most people running it would have guessed forty-five. Add up your real steps and that total is how long you take to get ready for work. Set the deadline to your own out-the-door time, put in your own durations, and every start time above it moves.
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.
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You'll see answers from about half an hour to well over an hour, and none of them transfer. Hair, breakfast, kids, and whether you shower at night all change the number. Time one ordinary morning of your own instead. That number is the only one that can set your alarm.
Your measured time, plus about ten minutes of margin written in as its own step. If you have never measured, assume the guess is short. The gap usually hides in the transitions between steps and in the minutes before the routine actually starts.
Cut steps out of the morning; don't try to rush them. Shower at night, put clothes out, pack the bag and the lunch before bed, decide breakfast in advance. What's left is dressing, eating something simple, and picking up a packed bag. That fits in fifteen minutes when there are no decisions left to make.
Your leave time minus your measured total. If that answer is earlier than when you usually get up, move the alarm. Don't trim the estimate until it fits the alarm you already have.
Ready Time does. You set when you have to be out the door, list your steps with how long each really takes, and it gives every step a start time and an alert. The measuring you did above becomes a plan you can rerun, and a repeating plan means the routine is already scheduled before you wake up.
To turn the total into an alarm time, see the wake-up time calculator. To add the commute on top, the leave time calculator. If the deadline is a start date, how to be on time for a new job covers the first two weeks.
Ready Time
You know what you need to do. Ready Time helps you know when to start.
Ready-made morning plans