This calculator forgets the plan when you close the tab. Ready Time keeps it and alerts you at each step.
Ready Time
You know what you need to do. Ready Time helps you know when to start.
For a 6:30 PM arrival with a 25-minute drive, this plan leaves the house at 5:50 PM, 40 minutes before, and starts getting ready at 5:05 PM. Set your own deadline and durations and it gives you yours.
A free leave time calculator. Enter when you need to be there and how long you need. This works backward and tells you when to leave, and when to start getting ready.
Ready-made versions of this
This calculator forgets the plan when you close the tab. Ready Time keeps it and alerts you at each step.
Ready Time
You know what you need to do. Ready Time helps you know when to start.
A leave-by time is just a subtraction you run in the right order. Fix the moment you have to be there, take off the travel, and you have the time you must be out the door. Take off everything that has to happen before that (showering, dressing, feeding people, finding the thing you always lose) and you have the time you must start.
The reason it usually goes wrong is that the steps you forget to subtract are always the same ones: parking, walking in from the lot, the ten minutes between deciding to start and actually starting. Put them in the calculator above and the number it gives you will be earlier than you expect. That earlier number is the accurate one.
It is worth deciding where the deadline really sits, too. Arriving at the building is not the same as being ready, and the gap is larger than it sounds: the walk in from the lot, the wait for the elevator, the ride up, the walk to your desk, somewhere to put your coat, a computer that takes its time booting.
If what you have to hit is a shift or a meeting, count all the way through to the moment you could actually start, and use that as the arrival time.
Set the arrival time to the moment you need to be at your desk, not at the parking lot, and put the commute in as its own step at the length it runs on a normal day, not a good one. Then add the steps before it. The leave for work calculator has the commute, the parking and the settling-in already as rows, and the shower to door routine is the part before the door written out.
Doctors, dentists and the DMV all want you there before the time on the card, and the check-in is a step of its own. Set the arrival time to the check-in time, add the walk in and the parking, then the drive. The doctor appointment plan has the paperwork and the forms-you-forgot step already in it.
Flights are the one case where the numbers are known ahead of time: security waits, the walk to the gate, when boarding closes. The airport leave time calculator has those rows already in it, and the per-airport pages fill them with that airport's numbers.
A stadium adds three steps most people skip: the lot filling, the walk in from it, and the gate line. The stadium pages have a plan for each NFL, college football, NBA and NHL building with its own lots, gates and transit, worked back from kickoff or tip-off to the time to leave.
The time on the ticket is the showtime, and being in your seat for it means the doors, the screening and the walk up before that. The concert venue pages work back from your showtime at amphitheaters and arenas, and the stadium pages carry a concert plan for each building that hosts shows.
That is the calculator above. Tap the time at the top, set it to when you need to be there, and read the leave-by time off the drive row. For a meeting that starts on the hour, set the arrival a few minutes early so the leave time absorbs the walk in and the settling down; the meeting prep plan does the same for a call from home.
The drive row is your leave-by time, and the top row is when getting ready has to start. Both come out of the same subtraction, which is why the steps people leave off change the answer so much. Set the deadline to your own 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.
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
Only if you add it as a step, which you should, along with parking and the walk from the lot. In this calculator you type the number yourself; round it up for the hour you'll actually leave. In the Ready Time app, a travel step can look it up: pick the place, choose drive, walk, or bike, and Apple Maps fills in the time.
Ready Time does. You enter the arrival time and your steps, and it works out the leave time and a start time for each step, with an alert at every one. For the drive it can pull travel time from Apple Maps so you don't have to guess, and when the deadline changes it updates every start time.
Not from this calculator. It's a one-off calculation that disappears when you close the tab. Ready Time is the same math with the parts that matter for real mornings: plans you keep, an alert at each step's start time, and repeating plans for the routines you run every week.
To work back all the way to the alarm, see the wake-up time calculator. Flying has its own per-airport version. For the reasoning behind the numbers, see how to stop being late or backward planning. If the problem is not the math but noticing the time at all, see time blindness.
Ready Time
You know what you need to do. Ready Time helps you know when to start.
More on being ready on time