Save this routine in Ready Time and it tells you when to start each step.
Ready Time
You know what you need to do. Ready Time helps you know when to start.
The focus block is on your calendar. You know what you need to work on. But first: coffee. Then email, just to clear the decks. Then a snack. Then the bathroom. Then you reorganize your desk. An hour later you haven't started. A backward plan turns the pre-work ritual into a timed sequence so the actual work begins on schedule.
If you struggle with task initiation, the warm-up activities (coffee, email, tidying) are your brain circling the task, looking for an on-ramp. Without a time limit, the circling never ends.
Instead of fighting the warm-up, plan for it. Ready Time gives each pre-work step a duration: coffee and snack, 10 minutes. Clear urgent emails, 10 minutes. Open your project and review where you left off, 5 minutes. Start. The warm-up still happens, but it has an end time.
Starting is the expensive part, and it has very little to do with wanting to do the work. The circling before you start, the coffee and the one more tab and the tidied desk, takes the time it takes, and fighting it usually costs more than budgeting for it. Give each pre-work step a duration and the circling happens inside something with an end time.
You still get the coffee. The reluctance is measurable and it isn't about motivation: in a 2018 study of 42 adults with ADHD, self-reported aversion to waiting was one of the largest differences from matched controls that the researchers found.
Stop treating coffee, email, and tab-closing as cheating, and stop letting them run open-ended. Give each warm-up step a short block, often about 20 to 30 minutes total, then a hard start time for the real work. When the last warm-up alert fires, you begin, even if it still feels early.
The on-ramp varies, but planning for roughly 15 to 30 minutes of setup before focused work is more honest than expecting to dive in cold. If your circling usually eats an hour, write that hour down once, then shrink it on purpose with timed steps instead of hoping willpower appears.
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.
“I get so tired of counting backward to when I should start my task. This app is the solution.”App Store review
Save this routine in Ready Time and it tells you when to start each step.
Ready Time
You know what you need to do. Ready Time helps you know when to start.