Ready Time
You know what you need to do. Ready Time tells you when.
A normal timer counts down from a number you choose. A reverse countdown starts at a moment that isn't moving — the flight, the appointment, the school bell — and counts back to when you have to begin.
A regular timer answers “how long from now?” You hand it 40 minutes and it spends 40 minutes. Useful, but it only knows what you told it.
A reverse countdown works from the other end. You give it the fixed point — boarding at 3:00, the appointment at 2:15, dinner on the table at 6:30 — and it counts down to that. The number on the screen is time remaining until something real, not time remaining on something you set.
Knowing there are three hours and forty-five minutes until your flight is not actionable. Three hours and forty-five minutes is plenty. It stays plenty right up until it isn't, and the moment it stops being plenty is the moment you needed to already be packing.
That is the real gap. The deadline is the easy part to remember. The start times behind it are the part nobody does the arithmetic for, and they are the ones that decide whether the deadline gets met.
You set the moment you need to be ready. You list the steps and roughly how long each one takes. Ready Time subtracts them from the deadline, in order, and lands on a start time for every step.
Then each step gets its own alert. Not “time is up” — “time to begin,” with the countdown to the deadline right there in the notification: Start packing. Flight in 3h 45m.
One deadline, six countdowns. Change the boarding time and every start time above it moves with it. Decide the drive is really 55 minutes, not 40, and the whole plan shifts earlier without you recalculating anything.
A timer that counts down to a fixed point in time rather than from a duration you enter. Instead of “40 minutes starting now,” it holds a moment — 3:00 PM, tomorrow at 8:15 — and shows how much time is left before it arrives. Backward planning apps take that one step further and count back through a list of tasks, so each task gets its own start time.
Ready Time does, and it counts down to every step before it too. You enter the time you need to be ready, add the steps that have to happen first, and it works out when each one starts. Every step gets its own alert at its own start time, with the time remaining until the deadline shown alongside it.
Event countdown apps count days until a wedding, a holiday, or a trip. They're for anticipation. A reverse countdown timer works at the scale of a single afternoon: the flight is today, the countdown is in minutes, and what you need from it is a nudge that says start now.
Yes. A plan is a sequence of steps, and each one carries its own start time and its own alert. You aren't setting six timers by hand and hoping they line up — you set one deadline and the steps arrange themselves behind it.
Repeating plans are part of the one-time Premium unlock, so a weekday morning countdown gets built once and shows up every weekday after that. The core of the app — deadlines, steps, backward math, and alerts — is free, and there's no subscription.
If a visual countdown disk is what you had in mind, the Ready Time vs. Time Timer comparison covers that ground, or see all app comparisons.
Ready Time
You know what you need to do. Ready Time tells you when.
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