timeto.me and the case for a productivity app built around one routine

The author says what the app is not three times

The most unusual thing about timeto.me is that its documentation is a confession rather than a manual.

The author opens by saying he built the app to manage his own productivity and will share his system and how he uses it. Then he rules out three things in a row. His system is not about time tracking, not about getting nice activity charts, and not about reducing wasted time. What it is about, he writes, is achieving real-life goals.

The examples that follow are deliberately small. He does not care how much time he wastes, but he cares if he reads a book every day, if he exercises every day, if he does not forget anything, and if he constantly follows his long-term goals.

This is a strong positioning statement for a productivity app in a category where the dominant pitch is measurement. Most of these apps sell you insight into where your hours went. This one is asking you to state a goal and then build a routine that hits it, and it warns you up front that there is no perfect app or system, that some solutions seem strange, and that they work anyway.

The description on the repository lists what the app does contain: goals, checklists, tasks, repetitive tasks, timer, stopwatch, calendar, notes, shortcuts, zen-mode, widgets, pomodoro and 24/7 time tracking.

Activities are the unit, and each one carries its own timer and checklist

The first thing you do in the app is set up activities, and the author shows his own list as it looks in the morning and as it looks by the evening, with the difference being which activities have been completed.

The rule for creating them is strict. The author only creates activities to follow real-life goals, and explicitly does not create activities just to track, mentioning commute and eating as examples of what he leaves out. Every activity, he writes, has practical value.

The mechanism inside an activity is consistent enough to describe generically. Tapping an activity shows a timer and a checklist. The timer limits the time the activity takes, and the checklist makes sure nothing is forgotten, with the author describing himself as just doing step by step. When the checklist is finished, the activity is marked as complete.

That generic case is the Morning activity, where he sets two hours as enough to do everything smoothly without spending more time on it.

The point of the design is that the two mechanisms are independent, and the author uses that independence differently in different activities. That is what makes the next two sections worth reading rather than skimming, because the same two controls are configured in opposite ways depending on the goal.

Workout is configured to complete itself so the habit survives

The Workout activity works, in the author's words, absolutely different from Morning, and the two differences are stated plainly.

First, Workout is marked as completed even if a checklist is not completed. Second, instead of a timer counting down, you see a stopwatch counting up from 00:00.

The reasoning is about behaviour rather than accuracy. He is not interested in tracking every single step, but he cares that he works out every day. The most difficult thing is getting started, so he taps Workout, which feels like the first step done, then commutes to the place, does the workout, comes back, takes a shower and has dinner. That usually takes up to four hours.

So the configuration is deliberately loose, and the looseness is the feature. He says he does not force himself into completing checklists or setting timers for this activity, and that only this way works best for him.

The Small Tasks activity is the third case, and it is the opposite again. These are the non-urgent tasks that everyone constantly postpones, personal matters and housework. He forces himself to spend 30 minutes on them, and after 30 minutes the activity is marked as complete.

Three activities, three different completion rules, one mechanism. That is a better argument for configurability than any feature list.

The developer's own activity uses a 45 minute pomodoro-like timer

The timeto.me activity, the one the author uses to work on the app itself, shows the timer's behaviour in more detail than the other examples do.

It has a timer, a checklist and tasks. The checklist is used in a way that looks wrong at first: every day the author starts by answering user questions, then marks the checklist as completed, and only then starts working. He calls that illogical and explains why it works. He does not know how much work he will get done that day, and it is frustrating that one of the activities will always remain uncompleted.

So the checklist is used to stop essential tasks being forgotten, and the timer to structure the actual work. The timer is set for 45 minutes, then a break, then the timer again, which he describes as a pomodoro-like technique.

When the timer runs over, it turns red and displays the overdue time. And the overdue state does not mean he is taking a break immediately, because sometimes he wants to keep working. You can tap the timer to start a break timer instead, though he admits he does not use that feature and just taps the activity again to start a new 45 minute timer.

The detail worth keeping is that the overdue display is informational rather than enforcing. The app records that the 45 minutes are up and lets the human decide, which is a different philosophy from the Workout activity where the app marks completion on its own.

Total Stopwatch answers one question: how much of today has been work

The Work activity is described as a special case, and the reason is that working as a developer means tracking working hours, which the author says has its own set of features.

The first of those is Total Stopwatch, which makes the timer display the total time spent on work for today. The author is precise about what that means: it is a regular stopwatch counting up, but it does not start from 00:00, it continues for the activity. The effect is that the number on screen is always the accumulated time for today rather than the length of the current session.

That is a small implementation detail with a real consequence. A session timer answers how long have I been working on this task. A total stopwatch answers how much of my day has gone on work, which is the question a person tracking billable or contracted hours actually needs.

The second feature is adding notes to the current task. You tap the edit icon on a task to make a note about what you are working on, and the history then shows how much time you spent on each task. The description of the repository also lists notes and calendar among the app's features, and the tree of the project has separate android/, apple/ and shared/ directories with a fastlane/ directory at the root, which is the usual arrangement for a Kotlin multiplatform app with a shared module.

Where to get it, and what the version numbers tell you

There is no build step to follow here, because the app is distributed rather than compiled by the reader, and the three channels are listed at the top of the documentation:

App Store https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6448869727
Google Play https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=me.timeto.app
F-Droid https://f-droid.org/en/packages/me.timeto.app

The F-Droid listing matters for a particular kind of user. The app is GPL-3.0, the repository carries a LICENSE file and a CONTRIBUTING.md, and the primary language is Kotlin, so this is a fully open source product rather than an open source wrapper around a proprietary one. An F-Droid listing means a build from source with no proprietary services, which is the configuration some people want from a tool that stores their daily routine.

The version scheme also tells you how the project is run. The releases are v2026.10.15.626, v2026.09.26.625 and v2026.09.19.624, which is a date plus a build counter rather than a semantic version. Releases land roughly weekly, on a cadence that reads like continuous delivery rather than a quarterly plan, and the last push to the repository was on 2026-10-16, the same day as the newest release.

For an app maintained by one person, that release rhythm is the maintenance signal, and the author says as much: he dedicates all the time he can to the project. The same section mentions option1.io, his personal project for a pragmatic window manager for macOS, which is configured the same way as the timeto.me activity.

What this approach will not do for you

The honest limitation is that this documentation is one person's system, and the app is built to run exactly that kind of configuration.

If you have never worked out what your day should look like, reading the walkthrough will not give you that. The author is explicit that the app is his setup and his reasoning, that he built it to manage his own productivity, and that he is sharing it. There is no general method here, and the tone of the writing, with the emphatic capitals and the repeated insistence on practical value, is persuasive for people who already agree with him and thin for people who do not.

The second limitation is that everything starts with a tap. Activities are not detected, they are started. The author taps Morning, he taps Workout, he taps Small Tasks, and the timeto.me activity starts when he taps it. There is no automatic sensing of context, so a routine that depends on where you are or what you just opened will not be captured for you.

The third is that the interesting behaviour lives in settings rather than in a visible feature. Total Stopwatch, the break timer, the notes on a task, the checklist-complete-before-starting pattern: each of these is a configuration choice, and the app will not suggest it. A user who installs the app and does not read the walkthrough will get a functioning timer and checklist tool and a good deal of behaviour they did not ask for.

The other half of the feature list, the widgets, zen-mode, shortcuts, repetitive tasks and 24/7 time tracking, sits in the repository description without being explained in the part of the documentation available here.

Editorial conclusion

timeto.me suits a person who has already decided how their day should run and wants an app that executes that configuration rather than one that suggests a new method, since the author publishes the exact settings behind each part of his routine, and it suits anyone who wants a productivity app they can audit and fork, since the code and the licence are open. It does not suit someone starting from nothing, because the documentation is a walkthrough of one person's system rather than a general guide, and it does not suit anyone who wants automatic activity capture, because the whole model assumes you tap the activity to start it. Before adopting it, read the walkthrough of the Morning, Workout and Small Tasks activities to see whether the philosophy matches how you already work, and note that the last push was on 2026-10-16 with release v2026.10.15.626.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. License: GPL-3.0
2. Medvedev91/timeto.me on GitHub
3. Project website
4. README
5. Releases