Tully

Tully

Documentation

Why I built Tully

I built Tully because I was struggling to juggle too many things and never seemed to have enough time for everything I wanted or needed to do. Every time I looked at my long and ever-expanding task list I felt completely overwhelmed and didn’t know where to start. And even when I knew what I had to get done, I had trouble figuring out how to fit it all into my day.

Like a lot of people in that situation, I’d tried many different apps. I liked using Apple Reminders and Calendar because they’re native and really well integrated into the Apple ecosystem. But I always found Reminders better at letting me add tasks than at helping me organise them or decide what to do when.

I’d also tried time blocking in my calendar, but I really disliked mixing actual commitments, like meetings and appointments, with things I was merely planning or hoping to do. And because things constantly change, those plans rarely survived contact with reality.

What I really wanted was a way to decide at a higher level how much time I wanted to spend on different parts of my life, and then have a flexible daily plan that was easy to change whenever it needed to.

Instead of looking at a list of 50 cleaning tasks and feeling guilty for never getting to them (I hate cleaning), I wanted to be able to say:

I’ll spend an hour on cleaning.

And then not see or think about the cleaning list until it was actually time to work on it.

These are basically the things that drove me to build Tully.

How Tully works with time

Tully lets you create time blocks for your day. A block can be pinned, meaning it happens at a particular time, or floating, meaning it can move later if other things take longer or something changes.

Floating blocks can also have a Not Before time. This means the block won’t start before that time, and any later floating blocks will move with it.

One thing I deliberately did not want was an AI scheduler or an app that decides what you should do next.

Tully doesn’t rearrange the order of your blocks or try to optimise your day for you. You create the plan. Tully tries to make it as easy as possible by suggesting blocks you've used before and letting you create templates for individual blocks, or even whole days, but you decide how you want to spend your time.

Tully then looks after the mechanics.

It lays your blocks out around your Calendar events and keeps adjusting their timing as the day changes. If something takes longer than expected, or another calendar event appears, later floating blocks get pushed back.

If everything you planned no longer fits into the day, the blocks at the bottom move into Overflow. This makes an unrealistic day very obvious. Instead of quietly pretending you can do 14 hours of things in eight hours, you can see that something has to give and decide consciously what to remove.

Today tab

The Today tab is the home for your daily plan. You can view the day either as a Timeline or as a List (tap the three dots at the top right). You can also tap the calendar icon to jump to any date, swipe between days, or pick a date from the date bar.

Calendars and events

You can hide entire calendars via Settings › Integrations or long-press to hide individual events if you don’t want them taking up space in your day or affecting where your time blocks fit. Hidden events won’t block out time in Tully, but they remain unchanged in Apple Calendar.

All-day calendar events aren’t shown in Tully, since they generally don’t represent specific events that need to block your timeline. In future I may add them to the Day Overview as alerts.

Time blocks

You can add blocks to any date using the + on the bottom right.

Blocks can be:

You can drag and drop blocks to change their order.

Title suggestions

When you start typing the title of a new time block, Tully suggests matching titles from your templates and previous blocks, so you can quickly reuse a block without re-creating it from scratch.

Why use Timeblock Templates?

Templates are useful because they appear at the top of the suggestions, and you can save additional information such as notes that will be copied into each new block. If you create a block from a previous block instead, its notes won’t be copied. (Templates are created and edited in Settings › Templates & Organization.)

Timeblock notes & checklists

Timeblocks can have notes, including Markdown checkboxes. There’s a button just above the keyboard to insert a checkbox, and you can tick items off directly from the expanded time block sheet without having to open the notes editor.

Day Templates

You can also create Day Templates if you often use the same broad structure (e.g. work-at-home days versus office days, or Mondays versus Tuesdays).

The point of templates is not to create a rigid recurring schedule. They’re simply a quick starting point for your day's plan.

When you apply a Day Template, you can choose to add its blocks to your existing plan or replace the timeblocks already there. Either way, your calendar events are left untouched.

Focusing on a block

When you start Focus on a block, Tully keeps that block active until you decide you’re finished. It doesn’t simply stop when the estimated duration expires.

If something takes longer than you expected, the block can continue into overtime and the floating blocks after it will move later. (You can ask to be notified when you reach the end of your planned time, and at regular intervals while you’re in overtime.)

If you’re interrupted, or you decide you need more time later, long-press the block to choose Continue Later rather than Complete. This tells Tully to create another block.

If you stopped before the planned end of the original block, the new block uses the remaining planned time. If you had already gone past the planned end, it uses a default duration instead (set in Settings).

You can change the duration of a block at any time by long-pressing it and choosing Edit duration. You can also choose Scheduling to switch between a floating, pinned or Not Before block, or Tomorrow to postpone it.

Seeing only the tasks that matter now

Another key feature of Tully is that it lets you see only one subset of your tasks at a time.

A time block – or a time block template – can be linked to combinations of:

or a specific reminder.

When you tap to open the block, Tully only shows available reminders matching those criteria.

The current matching rule is deliberately quite simple:

selected list(s) AND selected tag(s), plus tasks from any selected project.

For example, you might have a block called Phone calls linked to the tag calls, with no list selected. That block would show available reminders tagged calls, regardless of which list they belong to.

I may make this more configurable in future, but I didn’t want version 1 to require people to build complicated AND/OR search rules before they could get anything done.

You can also long-press a reminder and choose Add to block to manually add it to one of your blocks. That reminder will then appear in that block even if it wouldn’t normally match its list, project or tag filters.

Or you can long-press to Create block, which makes a dedicated block for that reminder, with the same name.

Day Overview

On the Today tab, you can swipe up to open the Day Overview drawer. Apart from some summary statistics, it shows you reminders that aren’t linked to any block, which reminders fall in each of your planned blocks, and upcoming deadlines.

You can long-press to edit reminders, or check them off just as you can elsewhere in the app.

If you have blocks that don’t fit in your day (Overflow), you can tap the up arrow to push them up to be next in your list of blocks. (Note: in future I plan to make this more configurable.)

You can choose which lists and tags appear in the Day Overview in Settings › Schedule & Timeblocks.

To Do tab

The To Do tab is Tully’s view of your Apple Reminders, with some additional features that Reminders itself doesn’t offer.

Start dates and deadlines

Tully treats the date on an Apple Reminder as a start date or planned date rather than a deadline. Separately, you can give a reminder a Tully deadline.

Not everyone cares about the distinction (and deadlines are entirely optional. But if something can be done anytime this week and is due Friday, you can set a separate start date and deadline. This also means that tasks which have no real deadline (like cleaning the oven) will not show up in red as 'overdue'. Ever.

Snooze

You can snooze a reminder in Tully. This does not change its date in Apple Reminders. It simply hides it from your current view until the snooze period ends.

I find this especially useful for recurring reminders. Sometimes a recurring task becomes due but I know I can’t get to it for a few days. Changing its Reminders date can mess up the recurrence pattern, whereas Snooze lets me temporarily get it out of the way without changing the underlying reminder.

Someday / Maybe

You can also mark a reminder Someday / Maybe. These reminders are removed from your normal working views and won’t appear inside time blocks. The idea is to have somewhere to keep things you might want to do without having them constantly competing for your attention.

You can see them any time in the Review tab.

Projects

Any reminder can be turned into a Tully Project. Other reminders can then be linked to it as child tasks.

Projects behave much like other reminders: they can have start dates, deadlines, priority and recurrence. Tully also gives you a dedicated Projects view so you can see all of them together.

Quickly editing reminders

Long-press a reminder to quickly change things such as:

You can always tap to open and see all details, including a link to open directly in Apple Reminders.

Repeat after completion

Tully supports Repeat After Completion.

Unlike a normal fixed recurrence, the next reminder is only created when you complete the previous one. For example, if something is set to repeat three months after completion, completing it on 15 September creates the next one for 15 December – regardless of when the previous task was originally scheduled.

One important limitation: the reminder needs to be marked complete inside Tully for Tully to generate the next copy. If it is completed somewhere else, such as directly in Apple Reminders, Tully doesn’t receive enough information to reliably trigger this behaviour.

Logging a past completion time

Normally, completing a reminder simply records the current date and time.

But if you forgot to mark something complete earlier today, or another day, you can long-press the reminder and choose Log Completion. You can then choose the completion date and time yourself.

This is completely optional, but I find it useful for things where I may later need to know exactly when I did it.

Custom list colours

Tully lets you choose custom colours for your Reminders lists, rather than being limited to Apple’s preset colours. The custom colours also appear in Apple Reminders, so your lists look the same in both apps.

Review tab

The Review tab is where things live that probably shouldn’t be demanding your attention every day but still need to be looked at occasionally.

This includes:

  • Inbox tasks (you can optionally select any Reminders list to be your inbox, where you capture things before deciding what to do with them – see Integrations)
  • Someday / Maybe reminders
  • Untagged reminders

It also shows you – in the Timeblocks section – which reminders match each of your saved templates and which don't match any template. This can give you a rough idea of which timeblocks you might need to schedule more often!

Review is one of the areas I most want to develop further.

I’d like Tully eventually to support a much better review process, including a short daily planning process and a more structured weekly review.

The goal isn’t to add more productivity work for the sake of it. It’s to create a useful way to look at what is actually on your plate before automatically filling the day or week with the same things you always do.

History tab

Tully keeps a history of your completed focus sessions.

If you assign time blocks to categories, you can see how much time you have actually spent on those categories over days, weeks and months.

There is also a heat-map view showing when you have spent time on them.

I’ve found this can be useful for planning. Say for example that I've always assumed I need half an hour to cook dinner. But then looking at my actual history makes it clear that dinner usually takes me more than an hour.

That kind of information is useful because better planning isn’t necessarily about squeezing more into a day. Sometimes it just means becoming more realistic about how long your life actually takes.

If you’re a data nerd, Tully lets you track your time in as much detail as you like. How you set up your categories and timeblocks is entirely up to you. For example, you might want to track exactly how long you spend cooking dinner, or you might only be interested in how much time you spend on household chores overall.

On the other hand, if you're not interested in time tracking, you can ignore it entirely. You can simply plan a few key blocks, work through the tasks in each one and get on with your day. Sometimes time tracking is a trap anyway.

Settings tab

Settings is where you can configure how you want Tully to work, as well as create and manage the reusable parts.

Integrations

Choose which calendars and Reminders lists to display in Tully. You can also (optionally) select a list to use as your Inbox, which then appears in the Review tab.

Schedule & Timeblocks

  • Start and end of dayThe hours between which you want Tully to schedule your blocks. Floating blocks will never start before the ‘start’ time (unless you pin them earlier), and anything that won’t fit before the ‘end’ time will move into the Overflow section.
  • Buffer between blocksHow much time you want Tully to add between floating blocks – anywhere from 0–15 min.
  • Min focusThe shortest focus session that Tully will save rather than discarding.
  • Default duration for new blocksDoesn’t apply to templates, which carry their own default duration.
  • Splittable by defaultWhether new timeblocks and templates default to being able to split around calendar events and pinned blocks. Can always be changed for any individual block.
  • Open detail view when focus startsIf toggled on, then every time you start focus on a block, the expanded sheet will automatically open, showing you your notes and linked reminders.
  • Unfinished blocksCan be set to leave them on the day they were scheduled, roll over or automatically delete when the day is over. This only applies to floating blocks.

There is also a setting to configure the Today drawer (Day Overview) to display or hide particular lists or tags. I use this to make sure my 50 overdue cleaning tasks don’t swamp my Day Overview.

Templates & Organization

Create and edit Tags, Categories, Timeblock Templates and Day Templates.

Tags are useful for linking reminders in timeblocks – a common use case is for ‘contexts’ where you can do a task (e.g. home, shops, phone).

Note: Tully tags are separate from tags you add in Apple Reminders (due to limitations in what developers can access – see below).

Categories are used for History and statistics, so you can see how your actual time is distributed between different areas. These could be areas of responsibility (work, home, family etc.) or any other categories you choose. Note that you assign timeblocks to categories within the History tab. Initially all your timeblocks will show as ‘Uncategorised’, and you can long-press to select a category. Once you’ve done this once, Tully learns which category a block with that name belongs to and will put all future blocks with the same name in that same category.

Timeblock Templates can be used for blocks you regularly use. A template can contain things such as its default duration, colour and linked reminder filters. (See Why use Timeblock Templates?)

Day Templates let you save a group of blocks and add them to a day together.

I use these as a starting point rather than a rigid schedule.

A Monday template might represent roughly how I would like Monday to look, but I can still quickly and easily add, delete or rearrange blocks however I like. (See Day Templates.)

Notifications

Tully’s notifications are configurable.

You can choose to be notified when:

  • a pinned block is coming up
  • a Calendar event is coming up
  • you reach the end of your planned focus time
  • at regular intervals (every 5–15 min) when you’ve run overtime

You can turn individual notification types on or off and configure when they appear.

Data & Sync

You can export your data at any time in JSON format, and choose to save this anywhere you like via the share menu.

You can also restore from a backup – however please take care as this will overwrite your existing data.

Widgets

Tully includes widgets that let you see what’s happening without opening the app. Depending on the widget and what you’re currently doing, they can show things such as:

  • the next blocks in your day
  • the block currently in focus
  • reminders linked to the current block
  • actions for the current focus session

The idea is to make Tully useful without requiring you to constantly open the app.

A few things to know about Apple Reminders

Tully works directly with your existing Apple Reminders and Calendar data rather than importing everything into a separate task system. That means changes made to normal reminder properties stay in sync with Reminders.

There are, however, some limitations in Apple’s EventKit framework.

Tags

Tully tags are not the same as Apple Reminders tags. Apple doesn’t currently give third-party developers full access to Reminders tags through EventKit, so Tully has to maintain its own.

URLs

For the same reason, Tully can’t read information stored in the URL field in Reminders. Tully therefore has its own URL field. Reminders with a Tully URL display a clickable link.

Locations

Tully can’t fully read and edit reminder locations either. If a reminder has a location attached, Tully shows a location pin so you know it’s there.

For any reminder, there is a link to directly open it in Apple Reminders if you need access to information Tully can’t display.

What I’m still working on

Tully is still actively being developed, and I have far more ideas than I have time to build. Some things I’d particularly like to add are:

As well as countless improvements throughout the app.

Tully grew out of the system I wanted for myself, and I’m still using it every day and working out ways to make that system better.

If you have feedback or suggestions, I would love to hear from you: tullytimeblocking@gmail.com