Why I built GoNow

The late one

I was diagnosed with ADHD, inattentive type, in December 2025. What finally sent me to get evaluated was the pattern I could not explain away any longer: hobbies and career pivots picked up with total conviction and dropped a few months later, and a habit of arriving late to everything. Long before the diagnosis, I had a reputation. Not for forgetting things, exactly. I always knew the meeting was at ten. I just could not seem to be in the room at ten.

A few years ago my sister got fed up and started lying to me. Not about anything important - just the time. For every event she invited me to, she gave me an arrival time 45 minutes earlier than the real one. Not the start time. The arrival time.

It worked, which is eventually how I caught her. I kept turning up braced for the apology I would have to make, and kept finding I was the first one there. When I worked out what she had been doing, I did not know what to feel. On one hand, I was not late any more. On the other, my own sister had decided the only way to get me somewhere on time was to tell me the wrong time, because I could not be trusted with the right one. That was when being late stopped feeling like a quirk I would grow out of.

What finally made sense

The thing that changed how I understood myself was the idea of time blindness: not caring less about time, but genuinely perceiving it less. Twenty minutes and an hour felt roughly the same until I looked at a clock. The ten minutes before leaving the house had a way of turning into thirty without a single moment where I felt like I was wasting time.

Once I saw it that way, my whole toolkit of fixes looked wrong. Alarms set "early" were just alarms I dismissed early. Calendars told me when things started, not when I needed to move. Every system assumed the problem was remembering. My problem was never remembering.

Why an app, and why this one

I tried the obvious things first: reminders, alarms, calendar alerts. They helped in patches, never reliably. What I actually did with them was swipe the notification away and fall back on my own estimate, and my estimate was always the same shape. The party is a fifteen minute drive, so surely getting ready twenty minutes beforehand is plenty.

It is not plenty. Choosing what to wear is five minutes. Showering and everything around it is another ten or fifteen. Finding keys, wallet, phone, hat is two more. None of that registered as real time to me, so none of it made it into the maths. I was never misjudging the drive. I was misjudging everything that had to happen before the drive.

So what I needed was not another app telling me when the event started. I needed one that added up all of it — the getting ready and the getting there — and then said the only sentence that actually changes what I do next: if you do not leave by 7:40, you will be late. One tool, one question. When do I actually need to leave?

I also wanted it to be kind. Most of us who are chronically late already carry more shame about it than anyone realises. The last thing I needed was an app with a streak to break and a red badge counting my failures. GoNow is designed as a companion. When it works, you are on time. When it does not, it adjusts and tries again tomorrow, and it does not lecture you in between.

Where things are

GoNow is in development for iPhone and Android. For the beta I hope to release an app for those with ADHD struggling with chronic tardiness and for those poeple who don't fall in the ADHD camp but still struggle with arriving on time. I am writing the blog here in the meantime because most of what I have learned about time blindness is useful whether or not you ever install anything, and because I would rather you trust me from the writing than from an ad.

If you want to know when it ships, the waitlist below is the only list I keep. If you have thoughts, the contact page reaches a real person, which is to say, me.

A note on what this site is not

I am a developer with lived experience, not a clinician. Nothing on this site is medical advice, and the quiz on the blog is a self-reflection tool, not a diagnosis. Where I cite research I try to link it; where I am speaking from experience I try to say so.