How to space supplements when your protocol says wait
Your document says wait. Tratto calls that a hold-off. This is how the rest of the day moves around one, in plain terms, with a calculator that runs on this page only.
What a hold-off is
Many protocol documents say something like “take this, then wait 30–60 minutes” or “keep this two hours away from anything else”. That instruction is a hold-off: a window after one step during which certain other steps must not fall. Binders are the usual case. Protocol documents most often attach a wait to one and say which other steps have to stay outside it. The reason belongs to the document, not to Tratto.
Two things follow from that, and both are easy to get wrong when you hold the day in your head:
- The hold-off runs from the time the step was scheduled, not from whenever you got round to it. If the document anchors the day to waking, the window moves with your wake time.
- Not everything waits. A meal, water, or a step the document does not mention can sit inside the window. Only the steps the document says must wait are moved.
How the day lays out
Say your document reads: a binder at 07:20, two hours clear; a step that waits for it, planned for 08:00; breakfast at 09:00.
| Step | Document says | Where it lands |
|---|---|---|
| Binder | 07:20, then two hours clear | 07:20 |
| hold-off after the binder until 09:20 | ||
| Step that waits | 08:00 | moved to 09:20, the first minute clear of the hold-off |
| Breakfast | 09:00 | 09:00; a meal does not wait unless the document says so |
When two hold-offs overlap, a step that waits for both moves past whichever ends later. A hold-off that would run past midnight ends at 23:59, in the app as here. That is the whole rule; there is no judgement in it.
Lay out your own morning
| Step | Planned | Lands |
|---|
Runs in this page only; nothing is sent anywhere. Every number here is one you typed or one you loaded from the example above; this page has no default of its own. One hold-off at a time: if your document has two, run it twice and take the later landing.
Why not just remember it
Because the window moves. Wake late, and every step counted from waking moves; the hold-off moves with it; the step that waits moves again. Doing that arithmetic three times a day for weeks is exactly the work a runner should do for you. Tratto does it from the text of your document: paste it once, tell it when you got up, and each day is laid out with the hold-offs kept.