Your First Week With TimeTaps: A Gentle Setup Guide

If you just downloaded TimeTaps, welcome. You may be tempted to open every screen at once and try the whole app on day one. Please do not. New tools fail ADHD brains most often because we adopt them all at once, get overwhelmed, and quietly stop.

This guide takes the opposite approach: one small thing per day, for seven days. By the end you will have a setup that fits how you actually focus, without ever sitting down to "learn the app."

You are not behind if you only do one of these a day. You are not behind if you skip a day entirely. The goal of this week is a habit that survives contact with a real, messy week, not a perfect week.

Before you start: everything in this guide is free

Every feature in this guide, the timer, the planner, the guided breaks, the hamster, the streak and its Streak Shield, calendar sync, and focus insights, is part of the free app. There is no account to create. TimeTaps Pro exists, and we will talk about it briefly at the end, but nothing below requires it.

Day 1: name your hamster, run one 15-minute sprint

Do exactly one thing today: get through the short setup, name your hamster companion, then run a single Focus Sprint at the shortest length, 15 minutes, on whatever small task is in front of you. That is the whole day. Fifteen minutes is short on purpose: the point is proof that the timer works and that fifteen minutes is a size your brain can hold. Your hamster will still be there tomorrow, so there is no pressure to do anything else with it yet.

• What to skip today: the planner, the settings, the themes.
• If fifteen minutes still feels too long, that is useful information, not a failure. Start shorter tomorrow.

Day 2: put three tasks in the planner

Open the planner and add exactly three tasks: one genuinely small, one medium, and for the medium one, break it into a couple of subtasks. You are not capturing your whole life today, just testing what it feels like to see a short list instead of a mental pile. Today view puts what matters right now in front, so your three tasks show up there without digging. Give a task a due date only if it actually has one.

1. Add a task you could finish in under ten minutes.
2. Add a task with a couple of steps, and break it into subtasks.
3. Add one more task, dated or not, whichever is true.

If you are a student, this is also a good day to peek at Student Mode, built for classes and assignments. You do not need to set it up fully yet, just know it is there.

Day 3: make the countdown visible without opening the app

Today's job is to get your sprint timer somewhere you can see without unlocking your phone. Add a TimeTaps widget to your Home Screen or Lock Screen, and start a sprint so you can watch the Live Activity count down there or in the Dynamic Island. A timer inside an app you have to open is one you will forget about. One sitting on your Lock Screen is something you glance at the way you glance at an actual clock, which is the whole point of making time visible again.

Day 4: try a guided break on purpose

When your next sprint ends, do not skip the break. TimeTaps includes six guided break activities, things like box breathing, hydration, and eye rest, and today is the day you do one instead of reaching for your phone the second the timer stops. A guided break exists because "I'll just check one thing" is how five minutes becomes forty-five. Let the app decide what a break is today, so your tired brain does not have to.

Day 5: understand your streak and your Streak Shield

By now you likely have a small focus streak going. Today, just look at it and understand what it means. A focus streak counts the days in a row you have engaged with your focus habit, with milestones at 7, 14, and 30 days. Because streaks can turn punishing fast, TimeTaps builds in a safety net: a Streak Shield bridges one missed day so a single off-day does not erase your progress. Free users can earn a Streak Shield with carrots, the reward currency you get for focusing, and you hold at most one at a time.

If you have been feeling anxious about "breaking the chain," this is worth sitting with. We wrote a longer piece on why streak apps backfire for ADHD, and what a streak that forgives looks like, which is exactly the philosophy behind this design.

Day 6: turn on Calendar or Reminders sync, if you want it

This one is optional. If you would like your existing commitments to show up alongside your tasks, turn on sync with Apple Calendar or Apple Reminders. Nothing syncs automatically without your say-so, and you choose exactly what comes in. If your calendar already lives somewhere else and you are happy with it, skip this day entirely.

Day 7: look back, then adjust

Open your focus insights and look at the week you just had. You are not grading yourself, you are looking for a pattern: which time of day did sprints feel easiest to start? Did fifteen minutes still feel right, or are you ready to try something longer? Use what you notice to adjust your sprint length. TimeTaps lets you set focus length anywhere from 15 to 45 minutes, so treat it as a dial, not a setting you picked once and must live with forever.

• Started strong but drift off midway? Try a shorter length for a few days.
• Timer interrupts you right as you get going? Stretch toward 30 or 45 minutes.
• Mornings beat afternoons in your insights, or the reverse? Plan your next sprints around that window.

If you want more after week one

Everything above is the free app, and it stays free whether or not you ever look at Pro. If you finish the week and want more, TimeTaps Pro is an optional upgrade that adds AI Task Breakdown to turn one big, vague task into small steps; Smart Scheduling, which learns your peak focus window and suggests when to start; Focus Lock in soft or hardened mode for days willpower alone is not enough; a handful of color themes; and a monthly Streak Shield refill.

None of that is required to get real value from the app, and nothing you build this week disappears if Pro is not for you. Try the free version fully first. If a specific Pro feature would solve a problem you actually have, that is the right reason to upgrade, and the only one that tends to stick.

For more on the ideas behind this week, see Pomodoro for ADHD: why short sprints work, and how to adjust them and the hardest part is starting: ADHD and task initiation. You can also browse the features page or the help center.