Time Lock, New Premium Feature

little countdown • software development
ios development

Sometimes you need a task to happen at a specific time. Maybe you need to leave for the airport at exactly 3:00 PM, or you have a hard deadline to be at a meeting at 10:00 AM. Little Countdown normally schedules all your tasks backward from your deadline, but that doesn’t work when one task needs to happen at a fixed time.

Time Lock lets you set a fixed start time for any Task in your Countdown. When you lock a task to a specific time, Little Countdown schedules the rest of your timeline around it:

  • Tasks before the time lock are scheduled backward from your deadline (as usual)
  • Tasks after the time lock are scheduled forward from the lock time

This gives you the flexibility to plan around fixed commitments while still letting the app handle all the math for everything else.

Example

You have a flight tomorrow at 6:00 PM, and you need to leave for the airport at exactly 3:00 PM. Here’s how you’d set it up:

  1. Create a Countdown with your flight as the deadline (6:00 PM)
  2. Add your tasks: “Pack bags” (30 min), “Call Lyft” (5 min), “Drive to airport” (45 min), “Get through TSA” (30 min), “Find gate” (15 min)
  3. Time Lock the “Call Lyft” task to 3:00 PM

Little Countdown will:

  • Schedule “Pack bags” to finish just before 3:00 PM
  • Lock “Call Lyft” to start at 3:00 PM
  • Schedule everything after (drive, TSA, find gate) forward from 3:00 PM to ensure you make your 6:00 PM flight

You get alerts for everything, and you don’t have to calculate when to start earlier tasks—the app handles it all.

Why This Matters

Time Lock solves a real problem we’ve heard from users: sometimes you need to work around fixed times in your schedule. Maybe it’s a carpool pickup time, a specific appointment slot, or a deadline that can’t move. Before Time Lock, you’d have to manually calculate when to start earlier tasks, which defeats the purpose of having Little Countdown do the math for you.

Now you can set that one fixed point in your timeline, and everything else falls into place automatically. It’s one less thing to worry about, which is exactly what Little Countdown is designed to help with.

Time Lock is available now as part of Little Countdown Premium. If you’re already a Premium subscriber, you’ll see the Time Lock option when editing any task (except the last one in your Countdown, since that’s already determined by your deadline).

We hope this makes planning your day even easier. As always, we’d love to hear your feedback!