TimeBucketDrip

A week has 168 hours, and a todo list or a calendar lets you plan more than that without complaining. Envelope budgeting solved the same problem for money: every amount gets a job, and you can only hand out what you have. TimeBucketDrip applies that idea to time.

It is a list of activities (work, a side project, reading, house maintenance), not a list of tasks. Each one gets a number of hours per week, and all of them together cannot exceed a weekly cap that you set.

• The weekly hours of an activity flow into its budget, either as a seventh per day or as a continuous trickle.
• You start an activity when you work on it, and its budget runs down in real time. Only one activity can run at a time.
• A budget can go below zero. The number turns red and climbs back by itself.
• The list is sorted by remaining budget, so the activity that has waited longest is at the top.
• An activity can be disabled. Then it gets no hours and does not count toward the cap.

No timer has to keep running

Starting an activity only stores a timestamp. The budget on screen is the saved budget minus the time since that timestamp, and the refill is computed from the time since the last save. So the app can be closed for a week, and when it opens again every budget is where it should be.

The cap is enforced in the interface

The slider for the weekly hours of an activity ends where the unallocated hours end. If everything is handed out, the slider is disabled, and a new activity only gets hours after another one gives some up.

One specification, two implementations

The idea goes back to December 2023, when the first outline was for an iPhone app with Core Data. In January 2026 I wrote a full specification, built a web prototype from it and then a SwiftUI version from the same text. The web version later changed from daily refills to the continuous trickle, because a daily or weekly lump produces a cycle of debt and reset.

The iPhone version stores its data on the device (Core Data and the app's settings) and contains no network code. The web version keeps everything in the browser's local storage.

TimeBucketDrip is work in progress. The last work on it was in February 2026.

The version that works is the web app with continuous refills, made for a phone browser, with browser tests. The iPhone version (SwiftUI, Core Data, with unit tests) was written in January 2026 and built for the iPhone on 2026-01-17. It has not been worked on since and is not finished. It is not on the App Store yet. A release under Volary AB is planned, without a date so far.

The drop is the icon made for the project in 2025, when its working name was TimeTrickle.

Back to the iOS apps