Ready Time
You know what you need to do. Ready Time tells you when.
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Enter when you have to be somewhere and what has to happen first. This works backward through your morning and lands on the time your alarm should be set for.
Ready Time
You know what you need to do. Ready Time tells you when.
Scan to
download
Most alarm times get picked by feel: 7:00 sounds responsible, so the alarm says 7:00, and then the morning has to fit whatever is left. When it doesn't fit, the squeeze lands on the same victims every time — breakfast, the unhurried shower, being five minutes early instead of four minutes late.
Run it in the other direction instead. Fix the moment you have to be there. Subtract the travel, the walking in, the getting ready, and the fifteen minutes it genuinely takes to become a person after the alarm fires. The number you land on is your wake-up time. It was never a choice; it was a subtraction waiting to be done.
Most wake-up calculators work in 90-minute sleep cycles: tell them when you'll fall asleep and they suggest wake times that avoid interrupting a cycle. Useful, but they answer a different question — when would waking feel best? — and they have no idea you need to be across town at 9:00.
This one answers the deadline question: when must you wake to make the morning fit? The two compose nicely. Get your required wake-up time here first, then hand it to a sleep-cycle calculator to pick tonight's bedtime. The order matters, because the 9:00 meeting is not going to move for your REM schedule.
The first step in the plan above isn't a shower — it's getting out of bed, and it has a real duration. If you snooze twice every morning, that's eighteen minutes of your morning whether or not you approve of it. Put it in as a step and let the wake-up time move earlier to cover it.
The alternative — setting the alarm for the time an idealized version of you would need — is how a calculated 6:55 quietly becomes a 7:13 start and a hurried everything after it. Plan for the person who actually answers the alarm.
The top row is the answer. Change the deadline to your real one, fix any duration that isn't yours, and the wake-up time recomputes — along with every start time under it.
Take the time you have to be somewhere and subtract everything that has to happen first: travel, getting ready, breakfast, and a real allowance for getting out of bed. Enter your own times above and the first row is your answer. If it's earlier than you'd like, the fix is shortening the morning or moving bedtime — not shaving the estimates.
Work backward from when you need to be at your desk, not from when work starts on paper. Include the commute at the time of day you'll actually make it, the walk from parking or the station, and anything that happens before you leave — kids, dog, gym, coffee. The calculator above does the subtraction once you've been honest about the steps.
Sleep researchers mostly say yes, and if you take that advice, run the calculator for your heaviest morning and let the lighter days keep the slack. If your wake time follows the day's first commitment instead, do the subtraction once per kind of morning — the gym day, the school-run day, the flight day — and keep each as its own plan. In Ready Time every plan carries its own steps and alerts, so a heavy morning never runs on a light morning's schedule.
Your number, not an average. Time one ordinary morning end to end — including the snooze, the phone check, and the hunt for keys — and use that. Most people measure something noticeably longer than their guess, and the difference is almost exactly how late they usually run.
Ready Time handles the second half: you set the deadline and the steps once, and every step gets its own start-time alert — get in the shower, start breakfast, leave now. Keep your alarm app for the wake-up itself; Ready Time is what keeps the ninety minutes after it from evaporating.
Once you're up, the leave time calculator covers the other end of the morning, and how to stop being late has the reasoning.
More on being ready on time