Get an alert when it's time to leave for work. Ready Time works back from your start time and tells you when to begin each step, every weekday.
Ready Time
You know what you need to do. Ready Time helps you know when to start.
To be at your desk at 9:00 AM with a 35-minute commute, this plan leaves the house at 8:05 AM, 55 minutes before, and starts the morning at 7:00 AM. Set your own start time and commute and it gives you yours.
A free leave for work calculator. Enter when you need to be at your desk, how long the commute really takes, and what has to happen before you leave. This works backward and tells you when to walk out the door, and when the morning has to start.
Mornings before work
Get an alert when it's time to leave for work. Ready Time works back from your start time and tells you when to begin each step, every weekday.
Ready Time
You know what you need to do. Ready Time helps you know when to start.
Start from the moment you need to be at your desk and able to work, which is later than arriving at the building and much later than arriving at the parking lot. Subtract the walk in and the elevator, then the parking or the walk from the station, then the commute at the length it runs on an ordinary day. What is left is the time you have to be out the door. Subtract the getting ready and you have the time the morning starts.
The commute is the row people get wrong, and they get it wrong in one direction. The number in your head is the good day. Put in the ordinary one, and if the first ten minutes of the day matter where you work, put in the bad one. A commute that is 25 minutes at 6 AM and 45 at 8 AM is a 45-minute commute for the purposes of this calculator, because 8 AM is when you are driving it.
Take 9:00, subtract ten minutes to get from the door to your desk and settled, subtract the parking or the walk from the stop, and subtract the commute. With a 35-minute commute and a ten-minute park and walk, that is 8:05 out the door, which is what the plan above shows. Change the three numbers to yours and the leave time moves with them. If your start time is 8, change the deadline and everything above it shifts an hour.
If you leave at a fixed time and arrive late anyway, the missing minutes are almost never on the road. They are before the door: a second coffee, a search for the shoes, one email read standing up. The fix is to give the steps before the door their own start times, so leaving on time stops depending on how the getting ready went. The shower to door routine is that stretch written out, and the top half of the calculator above is the same idea.
On the first day, treat it as a trip you have never made at that hour. Add the badge desk or the front desk as a step, add a few minutes to find parking you have not used before, and run the commute at its worst. Being on time for a new job has the first-day version written out, with the extra buffer a new route deserves.
Yes, and it changes it every day, which is why a fixed leave time is a guess. In the calculator above you type the commute yourself; round it up for the hour you drive. In the Ready Time app a travel step can look it up, with the drive, transit, walk or bike time filled in from Apple Maps for the time you will actually be leaving.
The commute row is the time to leave the house, and the top row is when getting ready has to start. Set the deadline to your own start time, fix the commute to the length it runs when you drive it, and every start time above it moves. To run it back to the alarm, the wake-up time calculator adds the getting up.
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.
With Premium, a Live Activity keeps the countdown on your Lock Screen between alerts.
“I tend to be overly optimistic when estimating how long things take, and this app has really helped me get it right.”App Store review
Ten minutes before you have to be working is enough for most jobs, and it is the gap between arriving and being at your desk rather than extra time for its own sake. If your start is a shift that begins the moment you clock in, or a meeting that starts on the hour, give it fifteen and count the walk from the door separately. Put that as the last step in the calculator above and the leave time absorbs it.
Only the number you type. Put in the commute at the hour you will actually be driving it, and round up. The Ready Time app can look the drive up from Apple Maps for your leave time, which is the honest way to handle a number that changes every day.
Ready Time does. You enter the time you need to be at your desk and the steps before it, and it works out when to leave and when to start each step, with an alert at every one. The plan repeats on the weekdays you choose, so a morning you set up once runs every working day.
Make the train the deadline. Set the arrival time to the departure of the train you need, then put the walk to the station and the getting ready above it. The time from the train to your desk is a second chain that starts when you step off, and it does not change the leave time at home. If the station is a big one, the Amtrak station pages cover the walk in.
For any other deadline, use the leave time calculator. To work the morning back to the alarm, see the wake-up time calculator, and for how long getting ready really takes, see how long to get ready for work.
Ready Time
You know what you need to do. Ready Time helps you know when to start.
More on being ready on time