Tuesday
Get Tuesday
Time blocking for iPhone, iPad, Mac & Vision Pro
A few minutes of planning changes how the whole day goes. Tuesday turns the day ahead into simple, colorful blocks, so the workout, the deep work and the school pickup each get a time before the day starts deciding for you.
The problem with lists
A to-do list tells you what. It never tells you when. So the things that matter most wait for a someday that never arrives. Time blocking gives every intention an appointment, and every appointment an end.
Why planning works
Behavioral scientists have tested this for decades, and the result keeps holding up: decide when you’ll do something and you become much more likely to do it, and much less likely to lie awake worrying about it. Researchers call that an implementation intention. Tuesday calls it a block.
In a study of 248 adults trying to exercise more, one group learned how much exercise would help them. It made them want to exercise more, but it didn’t change how often they actually did. The group that also wrote down exactly when and where they would work out followed through at more than twice the rate.
Milne, Orbell & Sheeran · 2002More than 3,000 employees were reminded about a free flu-shot clinic. Some were asked to write down the day they’d go, others the day and the time. Writing only the day made no reliable difference. Adding a time did.
Milkman et al. · PNAS · 2011A review of 94 experiments found that deciding in advance when, where and how you’ll act had a medium-to-large effect on reaching goals. It helped people get started, stay on course when distractions hit, and drop plans that weren’t working.
Gollwitzer & Sheeran · 2006Goals you haven’t finished keep pulling at you. They pop into your head while you’re trying to read, and they make other work harder. In a series of experiments, making a specific plan for those goals made the intrusions stop, before any of the work was done. You don’t have to finish everything to stop worrying about it. You just have to know when it’ll get done.
Masicampo & Baumeister · 2011In a sleep-lab study, young adults who spent five minutes before bed writing out the tasks ahead of them fell asleep faster than those who wrote about what they’d already finished. The more specific the plan, the faster they fell asleep.
Scullin et al. · 2018Every block is a plan you can see. When the day changes, drag the block somewhere new. A plan that’s easy to change is one you’ll keep using.
See it in actionSources
How it works
Every day starts like this: a column of hours and a head full of things you hope to fit in. Keep scrolling to plan one.
Connect Calendar and your appointments appear as reserved time, locked so nothing gets planned on top of them. Tuesday only reads your calendar and never changes it.
Drag a 15, 30, 60 or 90 minute block onto the timeline. It snaps to the quarter hour. The run, the deep work and the walk at lunch each get real time instead of good intentions.
School pickup, soccer practice and dinner at the table go in the plan too, so work can’t quietly eat them.
The commute, cooking dinner, getting out the door. They take real time, so give them a block and the day stops running late. Day by Color totals all of it, so you can see how much is work and how much is everything else.
What changes
Once the plan exists, the rest of the day gets easier. When you’ve already chosen when each thing will happen, you stop making that choice all day long.
We’re all optimists about time. In one classic study, students expected their thesis to take 34 days; it took 56. A list will happily hold eleven hours of work for a six-hour day. A timeline won’t, so you see what doesn’t fit while there’s still time to change the plan.
Buehler, Griffin & Ross · 1994Switch tasks and part of your attention stays behind on the last one. Researchers call it attention residue, and it makes the next task harder. A block gives one thing your full attention until it ends.
Leroy · 2009Work expands to fill the time available, so give it a fixed amount. A block with a clear start and end makes deep work go deeper, and you’re done when it ends.
“What should I do now?” takes energy every time you ask it. Plan for a few minutes in the morning and the rest of the day just follows the plan.
Workouts, pickups and dinner are the first things squeezed out of an unplanned day. Put them on the timeline first and plan the rest around them.
When work has its own blocks, so does everything else. At the end of the last work block you’re finished, and the evening is yours.
Try it right here
This is the real interaction from the app. Drag a block from the right onto Thursday, or tap one to put it in the next open slot. Blocks snap to 15 minutes and won’t land on top of each other or your calendar.
The details
Get an alert when a block starts, or 5, 10 or 15 minutes before. Move a block and its reminder moves with it.
See the current and next blocks on your Home Screen, desktop or in your space. Block heights match their real lengths.
Blocks land on clean 15-minute slots. Grab the handles on a block to stretch or shrink it, and a red outline appears before anything overlaps.
Start with five warm presets, rename them, or add your own named colors. Different blocks can share a color, so “Health” covers the run and the walk.
Everywhere you are
Tuesday is built natively for each Apple device and keeps the same plan on all of them through your iCloud account.
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Privacy
Your plan says a lot about your life. Tuesday keeps it on your devices and in your own iCloud, and nowhere else.
Your blocks live on your device and work offline. There’s no Tuesday account to create.
Blocks and colors sync through your private iCloud database. They don’t pass through any Tuesday server, because there isn’t one.
Your appointments show up as reserved time. Tuesday never copies them anywhere and never writes to your calendar.
Tomorrow
Spend a few minutes tonight giving it a shape, then go to bed knowing it’s handled.
For iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple Vision Pro.