OwnTime - A chess clock for your day's priorities
Show HN: OwnTime – a chess clock for your day's priorities
OwnTime is a time management app for iPhone and Apple Watch that applies the concept of a chess clock to your daily priorities. You set daily time budgets for each priority, and only one clock runs at a time—starting one pauses the rest. When a budget is spent, a real alarm goes off, even through Focus and silent mode, ensuring you're pulled out of deep work. The app works standalone on either device, syncs directly between them, and offers Siri and Shortcuts integration for hands-free control. Privacy is paramount: no server, no account, and your data lives in a plain SQLite file that you can export and analyze with your own tools. OwnTime is a one-time purchase on the App Store, requiring iOS 26.1 or watchOS 26.
When a budget is spent, a real alarm goes off, through Focus and silent mode. That is the whole point: it kicks you out of what you are doing when its time is up.
- Normal_gaussian
This is a great (and tight) execution of a neat concept. I'm not in the garden of Apple so unfortunately I can't play with it, but the preview is thorough. I particularly like the voice integration. I sympathise with some of the time allocation issues you mention, particularly when it comes to important but not urgent things.
Relatedly - I've struggled a lot in the last year with time tracking for fixed price projects (not so important, but useful) and billable hours (very important) largely due to the amount of parallelism I now do; and I think this notion of a "chess clock" may unblock me on building my own tracker for this!
- daitangio
Very nice, I will buy it.
I am also searching a special feature which add recurring alarms like every 45 minutes (for remembering to get up from my desk).
Can you add a feature like that or point me to a similar app?
- ndjdkdjej
That's a nice side project, however pomodoro timers are a dime a dozen
- deanputney
Very nice, I like your approach and design.
Counting up would be preferred for me on some tasks. Sometimes the timesheet approach is needed, it'd be great if you could support both.
- ktimespi
This sounds very useful to me, unfortunately i don't own an iPhone.