ready time

← All routines

🎯

You have three hours. You've spent one getting ready 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.

Circling the task

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.

The plan in Ready Time

  1. Set the deadline. Everything above it gets scheduled from there.
  2. In the app you add your own steps and how long each one really takes.
  3. Ready Time does the math and counts backward to a start time for every step.
Start Deep Work
10 min Coffee & snack 9:30 AM
5 min Clear urgent messages 9:40 AM
5 min Close extra tabs & apps 9:45 AM
5 min Open project & review notes 9:50 AM
5 min Set a timer & begin 9:55 AM
Start Deep Work 10:00 AM

Give the warm-up a schedule

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.

Task initiation if you have ADHD

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.

β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜…
β€œI get so tired of counting backward to when I should start my task. This app is the solution.”
β€” App Store review
Ready Time app icon

Ready Time

You know what you need to do. Ready Time tells you when.

Keep planning

More on being ready on time