How to use AlmostThere

What the app actually does

You give it a goal and the date by which you want it done. It works backwards: it divides the way there into monthly phases, each phase into weeks, and the nearest weeks into concrete daily tasks. In the morning you open the app and see a list for today.

The difference from a to-do list is that you do not write it yourself. The app knows how much time is left until the deadline and how much you have each day, and divides the work accordingly. When you start falling behind, it speaks up and offers a way out.

Before your first goal: settings

Three values in settings shape every plan, and they apply to all your goals together. It is worth going through them before you create anything — plans are built on them, and changing them later means replanning.

How much time you have for goals each day. Not how much you would like, but how much you manage even in a bad week. An inflated number is the most common reason plans collapse.

How often you want a day off. Choose none, one or two days a week, or every other day. Rest days are items in the plan, not gaps in it.

How many minutes a day for reflection. A short moment to note what worked and what did not. Zero turns it off.

Plus your time zone, so the app knows when your day starts.

How to create a goal

The goal matters more than anything else. The more specific it is, the more usable the plan.

1. 1Write the goal in one sentence. “Run a half marathon” beats “get fit”, because the first one tells you when you are done.
2. 2Choose a deadline. After the breakdown the app tells you whether it is realistic — and if it is not, why.
3. 3In the description add what the app should know: why you are doing it, what limits you, what matters to you.
4. 4In the “what you already have” field write where you are starting from. Without it, the plan looks the same for a beginner and for someone half way there.
5. 5Pick a colour. In the daily list it tells you at a glance which goal a task belongs to.
6. 6Click Break the goal down. It takes half a minute to a minute; leave the page open.

What you get

First you see how the app understood your goal, and an assessment of whether the deadline is realistic. Read it — this is the only moment when a misunderstanding can be caught before half a year gets planned around it.

Below that are the phases: month-long stretches with a description of what should be done by the end of each. Detail is filled in gradually — the nearest period down to weeks and days, the more distant ones staying as rough phases until their turn comes. It saves time and cost, and above all it leaves room for the road to change along the way.

Everyday use

The main screen shows today: tasks from all running goals, each in its colour, with an estimate of how long it takes. You tick them off as you go.

Above the list is a week strip with day abbreviations. Ticked days carry a check mark, today is highlighted. You can click through the whole week backwards and forwards — useful when you want to fill in yesterday or see what tomorrow holds.

Below that is a strip of the last thirty days. It is not a grade, just a picture of how it is actually going.

What to do when a task cannot be done today

Sometimes a task cannot be done for reasons the plan cannot know about — you do not have the money right now, you are waiting for someone else, it is raining. That is why every task has a “Not today” button.

It offers to move the task to tomorrow, to a specific date, or to set it aside without a date. The task is not swapped or replaced by another one — it is the same task on a different day. You can add why it did not work; that gets used when the plan is recalculated.

Do not tick off what you did not do. The app calculates your pace from the days you tick and advises you from that pace — one false tick and it starts telling you that you are on track.

If postponing leaves nothing else for today, the app offers tasks from the coming days that you can take instead. The plan does not grow, it just moves forward.

Tasks set aside without a date have their own list below the daily plan. They do not nag, but they do not disappear either — you can give them a date at any time.

When you fall behind

A missed day is nothing. But when three days in the last two weeks pass with nothing done, the app speaks up and offers two ways forward.

Catching up means leaving the deadline alone and replanning the rest so it still fits. Recalculating the deadline means moving the date to one that matches the pace you actually keep.

You always choose. The app never moves your deadline on its own, and if you decline, it does not ask again for a week.

Unfinished tasks from the last seven days appear above today's list. You can tick them off late, postpone them, or let them go — sometimes that is the right answer.

One practical tip: replan in the morning rather than in the evening. The new plan has to start today, so today's tasks are replaced by new ones — and anything you have already ticked off today goes with them. Ticked days from the past and your overall completion rate are never touched.

One more thing worth knowing: daily tasks are written out for the current period and the next one, so an absence of up to about two weeks is covered — enough for illness or a holiday. If you stay away longer, the days in between are left without tasks and the plan picks up when you return. Those empty days count as missed when your pace is judged, so on your return the app will tell you that you have slipped and offer to recalculate the deadline.

Milestones and rewards

Every phase of the plan ends with a milestone — a point where there is something to show. To each one you can attach a reward you give yourself for getting there.

Write the reward yourself, or have one suggested. For a suggestion to be worth anything, fill in what you enjoy and what does nothing for you in settings. Without that you get the average, which suits almost nobody.

A long goal gives no feedback for months. The milestone is what keeps it alive.

Several goals at once

You can run up to five goals side by side. They are planned together, so they do not land on the same days and do not exceed the time you set aside.

For each goal you set its importance. Daily capacity is divided accordingly — a more important goal gets more time.

A goal can be paused at any time; it stops appearing in the daily plan and stops claiming capacity. You start it again whenever you want.

To each goal you can upload images that remind you why you are doing it. One of them appears with your daily list; the more you add, the more variety you get.

How much you can use

Five concurrent goals and ten new plans a month. A new plan counts when you create a goal or replan an entire goal.

Everything else is unlimited and does not count: breaking phases into weeks and days, the daily tasks, reward suggestions. Someone who creates a goal and works on it will not use half of the allowance in a month.

Above that there is a monthly cap on AI spending, shown in the app as a percentage. It is set so that ordinary use never reaches it — it catches mistakes and abuse, not customers.

The app on your phone

The site works in a mobile browser and can be added to your home screen, from where it opens full screen without an address bar. Step-by-step instructions for iPhone and Android are on the install page.

In the app from the store you can turn on a daily reminder: your phone speaks up at a time you choose, even when the app is closed. It is scheduled on the phone itself, so nothing about it leaves for our server and it works without a signal.

Wherever you open the app from, you sign in with the same account and find the same goals.

Signing in inside the store app

In the app from the store you sign in with your e-mail and password. The “continue with Google” button is deliberately not there.

This is not a limitation on our side. Google does not allow signing in to its accounts inside other people's apps, and it has a good reason: in a window like that you cannot see the address bar, so you have no way to check that you are typing your password to Google and not to someone else. If we left the button in the app, tapping it would end on an error page from Google.

On the website you can still sign in with Google; nothing changes there. It is the same account and the same goals.

To switch to a different account inside the app, go to My account and sign out.

1. 1Created your account with Google and want to use the app? On the sign-in page, tap “Forgot your password?”.
2. 2Enter the address your Google account uses.
3. 3Open the link that arrives by e-mail and choose a password.
4. 4That password signs you in inside the app. Signing in with Google on the website still works — the password is a second way into the same account, not a replacement.

Account, payment and leaving

Accounts and subscriptions are set up on the website. You pay monthly or yearly; yearly works out as two months free.

You cancel the subscription in the app with one button. It runs to the end of the period you have paid for — paid time is never cut short — and then does not renew. Until then you can undo the cancellation.

You can delete the account in settings. It is not a deactivation: goals, plans, tasks and uploaded images are really deleted. What remains and why is described on a separate page about deleting your account.

What happens to what you write here

The titles and descriptions of your goals and tasks are stored encrypted. The text of your goal is sent to a language model that builds the plan from it — it goes nowhere else, is never used for advertising, and nobody reads it out of curiosity.

Images are re-encoded on upload, which strips their metadata including location data. They are shown only to you, after signing in.

The full detail is in the privacy policy.