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.

Templates: when you do not want to start from an empty box

The empty “what is your goal?” is the hardest place in the whole app. Write “lose weight” and you get an average plan — not because the app cannot do better, but because there was nothing in the brief to work from.

A template does not make that step easier by filling in boxes for you. It carries expertise: the order that cannot be skipped, the usual mistake that makes people give up, what counts as progress, and what gets cut first when you stop keeping up. The plan is built on that, and it is the part you never see.

Instead of a single “where are you starting from?”, a template asks three specific things that decide how this particular route should go. Those answers are what the app would otherwise have to guess.

You will find templates on the button next to New goal. Each one has its own page saying in advance how the plan runs and what gets sacrificed first — and that page is public, so you can send it to anyone, account or not.

A template is a shortcut, not a requirement. A goal written from scratch works exactly the same way.

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.

Every task carries instructions for how to do it today — a few steps, not one sentence. The last step is usually one that proves the work landed rather than merely happened: explaining it out loud, one harder example, doing the same thing again without help. Anyone can tick off “I spent time on it”; that is not the point.

On goals where you are learning something, tasks will sometimes send you to talk a topic through with an AI chat — including when you have no materials at all. It is a source every single person already has, it costs nothing, and it answers at your level for as long as it takes. The task tells you exactly what to ask, and often to have the chat test you afterwards. We recommend Claude.ai, but any chat you like works.

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.

When the plan does not suit you

Replanning after a slip deals with not keeping up. Sometimes the trouble is elsewhere: the tasks fit the goal, they just do not fit you. Running works in a forest and on a track, studying works in the morning and in the evening — and a plan you do not want is a plan you will not follow.

So the goal page has an Adjust the route button. You write in your own words what should go differently, and the rest of the plan is reworked around it. The deadline stays and so does the goal.

Whatever is genuinely needed to reach the goal stays in the plan, even if it sits awkwardly with the request. If the two cannot be reconciled at all, you will be told why — the app would rather say so than quietly obey and leave the goal out of reach.

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.

The reward for the whole goal sits separately, next to the final test — see the next section. Milestones hold the route together; that last one closes the whole thing.

How the goal ends

Every plan has a final test: one concrete thing that proves the goal is reached. It is rarely a test in the school sense. More often it is the thing itself, done for real — the finished drawing rather than another exercise, the race rather than another training run, half an hour of conversation with someone who does not slow down for you.

Three things make it count: it is done unaided, under real conditions, and in one go rather than in pieces over weeks. You see it from day one at the top of the goal page, because the whole plan is worked backwards from it. The last stretch of the plan is set aside for it.

Next to it is the reward for finishing. You either write it yourself or have one suggested, the same as with milestones — only bigger, because it closes months of work. It stays visible the whole way rather than appearing at the end: knowing what is waiting is half the reason for getting there.

When the goal is done

Once there is nothing left to tick off, the app asks — not before. It used to ask throughout the final week, and a goal could be closed too early that way; now it speaks up when today holds nothing more, or when the deadline has passed and the day is done.

At that point you have three options. I have finished closes the goal. Not yet closes the window and asks another time. And the third is I want to take it further: the goal is at its end, but not the way you pictured it. You write what is still missing, give a new date, and the rest of the plan is written out.

Closing a goal is not a change of status in a database. You get your own page with a summary of what you went through and the numbers: how many days, how many tasks, how many rest days, how many stages. That is also where you take your final reward.

And then you are offered a follow-up. A new goal that comes out of the finished one — after a sketching course, landscape, say. It does not start from zero: it knows where you got to. The original stays among your finished goals and the celebration stands.

Finished goals have a collection of their own. Most people never finish the goal they set; this is where it stays visible that you did.

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. A pause can last for months. When you start it again, the rest of the plan and the deadline move forward by exactly as long as the goal stood still — you pick up where you left off, only with today's dates. Nothing is generated again and it costs nothing; the order and the spacing stay as they were. What happened before the pause is not rewritten.

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.

The morning reminder and the thought for the day

In the morning the app sends you a short text — the thought for the day. The notification shows today's topic and the first sentence; tapping it opens the whole thing, and you can have it read aloud. It arrives even on days when you have no goal running.

You turn it on in Important settings. Right below the settings there is a “Send a test notification” button — use it. It answers within a second and it is the only way to check that notifications really arrive without waiting until morning.

Notifications are set up per browser and per device, not per account. Turning them on at your computer tells your phone nothing. On every device where you want them, you have to turn them on again — and on every device you can turn them off separately.

Delivery is handled by your browser, not by us. We hand the message to its push service and our part ends there. That is why it can arrive late when a device is off or offline — it waits and is delivered once the device checks in. And it is why the test says “sent”: beyond that point we cannot see.

1. 1Nothing arrived and the test says the browser is not subscribed: switch reminders to “Never” and back. That recreates the subscription.
2. 2The browser never asked for permission: it probably has notifications blocked for this site. Allow them in its settings for this address.
3. 3On iPhone, notifications only work once the app is added to the home screen — not in Safari itself. That is a system limitation.
4. 4The app from the store works differently: there the reminder is scheduled by the phone itself. Nothing is sent from a server and it works offline — but Android can delay or cancel such reminders to save battery. If they are unreliable, add the app to the battery optimisation exceptions, or use the web version added to your home screen.

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.

Extras: thoughts, music, sharing

Alongside the plan there is an Extras page — the button is in the header, next to the appearance switch. Everything on it is free and open without an account.

The thought for the day is a short piece of writing for the morning. One a day can come to you as a notification, but you can read any of them at any time, and have them read aloud. The full list has its own page.

The music is made up of tracks written for posts on social media. Good for getting going, for concentrating, or for nothing in particular.

A piece of writing and a track can both be shared by QR code. Open the code, hold the screen up, and the other person opens it on their own device — no link to send and no account needed.

Account, payment and leaving

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

It starts with a seven-day free trial. You do enter a card — there would be nothing to start the subscription on otherwise — but nothing is taken during those seven days and you can cancel at any point. Two days before the end you get an email, so the switch to paying does not catch you out. The trial is given once; anyone who has had a subscription and cancelled it does not get a second one.

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 the cancellation can be undone.

You can delete your account in settings. This is not deactivation: goals, plans, tasks and uploaded images really are deleted. What remains and why is set out on a separate page about closing an 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.