A chess clock for your day.
Define a few priorities and give each a daily time budget. Only one clock runs at a time, so starting one pauses the rest. When a budget is spent, an alarm goes off. iPhone, Apple Watch, or both.
The budgets are not much more than a few mutually exclusive countdown timers. You start one when you begin working on something and stop it when you are done, or start the next one and let it pause the first. At midnight, everything resets. Each device works on its own. Phone and watch keep each other in sync when they are paired, and the watch is usually the quicker place to glance, start, and stop.
The ring is the sum of your daily budgets — 7½ hours in these screenshots, not the 24-hour day. Each priority is one segment in its own colour: the dark part is time already spent, the light part is still yours. The number in the centre adds up everything still yours — or, while a session runs, the time left on that one priority.
On your iPhone
On your Apple Watch
Why a new app?
- Watch is a first-class citizen. Actually, I first tried to make it Watch-only, but alarms require a phone app on iOS.
- Forward-looking, positive, and today-focused at the same time, by emphasizing where you want to spend your time, not where you “lost” it, and not by drowning you in todo items that won't fit today anyway.
- Alarms were the number 1 requirement. A notification is too easy to miss when you are absorbed in something.
- The app is an input tool and alarm host. Otherwise, it has no use for your data. You can export the whole history as a SQLite database and evaluate it however you like, with whatever tools you like. SQLite is a long-term storage format and understood by a myriad of services, frameworks and libraries on all platforms.
Hands-free with Siri
Every action is also a Siri phrase, on iPhone and Apple Watch, and a Shortcuts action for your automations. On Apple Watch Ultra you can put the toggle on the Action Button.
Name a priority in the phrase, or leave it out and Siri asks. Replace [priority] below with one of yours, like “Deep Work”.
Start a session
- “Start OwnTime”
- “Resume OwnTime”
- “Start [priority] in OwnTime”
- “Start an OwnTime for [priority]”
Stop a session
- “Stop OwnTime”
- “Suspend OwnTime”
- “Stop [priority] in OwnTime”
- “Stop the OwnTime for [priority]”
Start or stop in one phrase
- “Toggle OwnTime”
Stops the running session, or starts the last priority if none is running. This is the one for the Action Button.
Log time you already spent
- “Log past time in OwnTime”
- “Log past [priority] time in OwnTime”
- “Log a past OwnTime for [priority]”
Siri asks how many minutes to log.
Private by design
There is no server and no account. Your priorities and sessions stay on your devices. Phone and watch sync directly with each other over Apple's WatchConnectivity, never through us and never through the cloud. The privacy policy has the details.
No Apple Watch required. iPhone alone, Apple Watch alone, or both.
Take it with you
I didn't build any statistics into the app. Instead, one tap exports the whole history as a plain SQLite file, the same store the app runs on. Open it in a notebook, write your own queries, or hand it to whatever tool you like. It is your data, in a format that outlives the app.
Where the export goes is up to you. Once you share it, the file is outside OwnTime and outside the privacy policy. That is the point.
