Ready Time
You know what you need to do. Ready Time tells you when.
Enter the time you have to be there and the steps that come first. This works backward through them and tells you when to start getting ready.
A leave-by time is just a subtraction you have to 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 goes wrong isn't the arithmetic. It's 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 below and the number it gives you will be earlier than you expect. That earlier number is the accurate one.
Steps, in the order they happen
Nothing here is sent anywhere. The math happens in your browser, and the page forgets it when you close the tab. To keep a plan and get an alert at each start time, that's what the app is for.
Start at your arrival time and subtract, in reverse: the walk in from the car, the parking, the drive itself. What's left is your leave-by time. Then keep going through everything that has to happen before you can walk out — that gives you the time to start getting ready, which is the number people usually skip and the one that decides whether the leave-by time gets hit.
Whatever 8:00 minus your real routine comes to. Enter 8:00 above and put in your actual steps with measured durations, not remembered ones. If the calculator says 6:52 and your alarm is set for 7:15, you've found the reason the mornings feel like a sprint.
There's no useful average, because the number depends on showering, hair, breakfast, and how many other people you're responsible for. The number that helps is yours: time an ordinary run of the routine once, including the parts you don't count. Most people find the measured figure is noticeably longer than the one they'd have guessed.
Only if you add it as a step, which you should — along with parking and the walk from the lot. Traffic estimates are a maps job; put whatever your maps app tells you into the drive step, and round up for the time of day you'll actually be travelling.
Not on this page — 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.
For the reasoning behind the numbers, see how to stop being late or backward planning.
Ready Time
You know what you need to do. Ready Time tells you when.
Ready-made versions of this
More on being ready on time