A timed list of steps that runs itself

List the steps in the order you do them and give each one the time it actually takes, not the time you wish it took. Press Start and the timer runs the first step, chimes, and moves to the next without you touching anything. The step you are on is the large text, the one after it sits underneath, and the line under the bar tells you which step you are on and how much of the routine is left.

Putting a visible timer on each step of a morning or a transition is a standard executive-function support, and it is one of the more common recommendations for children and adults with ADHD as well as in general parenting advice for getting out of the door. The reason it helps is not motivation. It moves the work of tracking time out of your head and onto something you can look at, and it makes a vague block like "get ready" into a series of small commitments that each have an end.

Keep the steps short and concrete. "Shower" and "pack bag" work because you can tell at a glance whether you are on schedule. "Get organised" does not, because there is no moment where it is obviously finished. Five to eight steps is usually plenty.

The countdown is anchored to the system clock rather than to a ticking counter, so it stays honest if the tab goes to the background or the phone sleeps for a moment. Pausing stores your position and rebuilds the schedule when you resume. Routines are saved in this browser only, so a copy of the text from the export box is the way to move one to another device or hand it to someone else.

Six steps: tidy up 5:00, bath 12:00, pyjamas 4:00, teeth 3:00, story 10:00, lights out 1:00. The three figures under the controls read 6 steps, 35:00 in total and 12:00 as the longest, and that longest figure is the one to look at twice, because a single step worth a third of the routine is usually two steps that have not been separated yet. Press Start at 18:45 and lights out begins at 19:19, with the routine done at 19:20.

While the bath runs, the large text says Bath, the line underneath says Next: Pyjamas (04:00), and the bar reads step 2 of 6 with the minutes left in the whole routine beside it. That second line is the useful one for anybody else in the room: it answers how much longer this is going to take without anybody having to ask.

Nothing waits for you. A bath that really takes fifteen minutes means that by the time you are out, the timer is three minutes into pyjamas and showing 1:00 left on it, which is the honest version of what happened rather than a routine politely holding the door. Skip jumps the clock to the end of the step you are on, so the rest of the list starts early and keeps its full lengths, which is what you want when a step finishes ahead of time. Pause is for a genuine interruption; it holds the position and picks the schedule up from there.

After a week of running it, change the numbers rather than your expectations. A step that overran on five days out of five was estimated wrongly, and a routine whose times are fiction gets ignored within a fortnight.

Copy this routine puts a small piece of JSON on the clipboard holding the name and each step's label and length in seconds. It is short enough to paste into a message, and whoever receives it pastes it into the import box here. Importing always creates a new routine rather than overwriting the one on screen, so nothing you already have can be lost by pasting the wrong thing, and text that is not a routine is refused with a note instead of half-applied.

The import is deliberately forgiving on the way in. Steps beyond the thirtieth are dropped, labels longer than sixty characters are cut, a step with no label at all is skipped, and a length outside the allowed range is pulled to the nearest end. A routine arriving without a name becomes Imported routine, which you can rename in the field above the list.

The same ceilings apply to routines you build here: thirty steps, labels of sixty characters, and a step between five seconds and six hours, entered as minutes up to 360 plus seconds up to 59. The Morning routine you see before you have saved anything is an example rather than a default, which is why Delete is unavailable until you have made a routine of your own.