Ready Time
You know what you need to do. Ready Time tells you when.
A checklist tells you what comes next. A start time tells you whether next is now. Ready Time works backward from the end of the routine and puts a clock time on every step.
Most routine apps are an ordered list plus a start button. That's genuinely useful for remembering the sequence — nobody forgets the bath, but plenty of people forget the pajamas until the kid is already in bed.
What a list can't tell you is whether you're on schedule. Step four of seven at 7:35 is either fine or a disaster, and the list has no opinion, because nothing in it is attached to the clock.
The next step up is a routine timer: each step gets a duration and the app walks you through them. Better, but the whole schedule is anchored to the moment you tapped start. Tap it at 7:19 instead of 7:00 and the app will guide you carefully, one step at a time, to finishing nineteen minutes late.
Which is the wrong anchor. The bedtime that matters is lights out at 8:00, not whenever bath time happened to begin.
Ready Time asks for the end first. Lights out at 8:00. Out the door at 8:15. Laptop closed at 5:30. Then you add the steps and their durations, and it subtracts backward to a start time for each one.
Now the routine has clock times in it, and each one comes with an alert. You aren't checking a list to see where you should be. The plan tells you, at the moment it becomes true.
A routine gets built once. Repeating plans, part of the one-time Premium unlock, put the same schedule back on the calendar every day or every week without rebuilding it. Time Lock pins one step to a fixed clock time — the train, the meeting, the show — and arranges the rest around it.
Plans can also be handed to someone else. Send the bedtime routine to a partner or a sitter and it lands on their phone with its own alerts, so the routine survives you not being the one running it.
Three steps and one deadline. The value isn't the list — you knew the list. It's that bath time now has a 7:00 next to it, and something will say so at 7:00.
A routine app that assigns each step a time on the clock rather than a position in a queue. Instead of “step 3 of 6, 12 minutes,” you get “story time, 7:30.” The times come from the deadline: the app subtracts the steps backward from when the routine has to be finished.
Ready Time does this by design. You set the time the routine must be done, add the steps with their durations, and every step gets a start time and its own alert. The alert fires when it's time to begin that step, not when the time for it has run out.
Yes — repeating plans are part of the one-time Premium unlock, so a weekday morning or a nightly bedtime routine gets built once and comes back on schedule. The core app is free, and there's no subscription.
You can send a plan to another person — a partner, a sitter, whoever is running the routine tonight. They tap once and it's on their phone with their own alerts for each step, so handing over the bedtime routine doesn't mean handing over the timing too.
You find out immediately, which is the point. The later start times are computed from the deadline, so a step that overruns is visibly eating into the next one rather than quietly pushing the finish later. If the estimate was simply wrong, change the duration and the whole plan recomputes from the deadline.
Comparing against a voice-guided routine timer? See Ready Time vs. Routinery, or browse every routine.
Ready Time
You know what you need to do. Ready Time tells you when.
More on being ready on time