We’re thrilled and honored to welcome back to the blog the esteemed Mary Renaud, PhD. Though for now, only iPhone people can reap what Mary has sown…
I’m excited to officially announce my first iOS app: Time Stream!
What is Time Stream?
Time Stream is a routine management app that adapts when your day doesn’t go as planned. Routines will wrap around things that get scheduled into your day or adjust when something takes longer than expected.
I’ve had a lot of trouble with rigid scheduling apps and calendar templates that broke in the face of life’s little interruptions or when my schedule changed a little… So I built something that lets my routines kind of ride the current of the day.
You can create personalized morning, evening, and custom routines, each with activities with estimated durations. The app estimates when each routine will be finished and those completion time estimates update as you go. When the inevitable happens and things change (something runs late or gets interrupted or procrastinated), it automatically recalculates when the other activities and routine can fit in, so you can see exactly what you’ll still have time for, and you can adjust without losing track or spending a bunch of time fiddling with changing today’s plan. It also shows you exactly how your routines will wrap around your calendar events, and will give you visual cues if your routines are going to run past important critical times in your day, like when you need to leave for work. And it keeps me honest about whether “I’ll just do that later” is actually feasible, because I always know how much buffer I have in my day between my routines and my events or important times thresholds.
What’s The Benefit of Adding Beeminder Goals to Time Stream?
As a Beeminder user of over 12 years, it was critical to me that it work with Beeminder. Beeminder has had a huge effect on the shape of my life. But, given I tend to beemind a lot, I’ve also had a hard time being able to visualize when my day was getting off the rails and my infinitely many Beeminder goals wouldn’t all be accomplishable if I didn’t get moving RIGHT NOW. (I used to use the fantastic waterfall method, but things changed a little in my day’s structure, making it harder to make that work.)
Each activity can be linked to a Beeminder goal so that, when you check it off in Time Stream, it adds a +1 datapoint to that Beeminder goal immediately (or, as of a recent update, if you check it off while offline, it will add it as soon as you’re back online).
And since I’ve never seen an over-engineered system I didn’t love, I also added “critical times” which are visual representations of thresholds in the day that I want to be aware of. We can use this for things like making sure morning routines are done before the “critical time” to leave the house or that evening routines don’t extend past bedtime. Beeminder users can also, if we want, set the deadlines for activities in a given routine to a specific deadline, and then set that deadline as a critical time in the app. The app will then flag if a routine connected to that critical time is going to go past that deadline, so you know if you’re at risk of derailing any of the goals in that set.
Setting Up Your Time Stream + Beeminder Goals
In the Time Stream app, go to Settings > Integrations > Beeminder. You’ll need to authenticate with Beeminder. This does not get sent to or saved to any Time Stream servers or anything (nothing does). Then, select which Beeminder goal should receive +1 data from Time Stream activities by selecting the goalname and the activity.
That’s it. Done.
You can connect more than one activity to a goal. (I use this, for example, because my Weekend routine and Weekday routines are different, but some of the activities overlap, and I don’t want two different Beeminder goals for the Weekday & Weekend versions of that commitment.)
Caveats
A New App from a New Developer: I’m brand new to developing for Apple devices, so there are still a few bugs being worked out. I’m fairly confident there are no bugs left in the Beeminder integration, though. Since those are potentially costly to users, they’re top priority. The price will go up between 50% and 100% down the line but, for now, I’m keeping it at the current price ($8 USD), in case there is the occasional bug that might be frustrating to users as I learn.
Upgrades won’t be free, but there’s no subscription cost: There are no server costs, so I’m going with a no-subscription model. You buy the current version and don’t have to pay for it again. When major updates happen, you can choose between sticking with what you’ve got, or upgrading. Bug fixes will be included for two years for each version (as long as we’re still in business!) but new major versions or fixing older version when new a iOS break things won’t be.
In the End…
Building Time Stream has been my own answer to years of life’s unpredictability clashing with my “perfectly” planned routines and Beeminder goals.
If you, too, know the pain of frantically calculating whether you can still hit all your goals when your day goes sideways, maybe this will be helpful for you too.
Want to get started with Time Stream? Download it at time-stream.app.