Widgets & Live Activities

Home Screen Widgets

Add Set widgets to your Home Screen to see your Today tasks at a glance without opening the app.

Adding a Widget

1. Long-press on your Home Screen until apps start jiggling
2. Tap the ”+” button in the top left corner
3. Search for “Set” in the widget gallery
4. Choose a widget size and tap “Add Widget”

Set offers three sizes: small, medium and large.

Available Widget Sizes

Small Widget

Shows your progress at a glance:

• Task count: Completed/total tasks (e.g., 3/5)
• Remaining time: How much of the day is still to run, breaks and events included
• Finish time: When you’ll be done

Medium Widget

Focuses on what’s next, which may be a task, a break or a meeting:

• Name: What’s coming up next
• Project/priority: Based on your color mode setting, or a calendar glyph if it’s an event
• Start time: When it begins
• Duration: How long it will take
• Finish time: When it ends

Large Widget

Displays the next 4 things in your day:

• Today’s date at the top
• The list: Each row showing start time, duration, and project/priority
• Remaining count: Shows “+X more” if you have more than 4 left
• Tasks, breaks and events appear in their scheduled order

Events in Your Widgets

Your calendar events are merged into the widgets by time, exactly as they are in Today, so the next thing shown really is the next thing. A meeting can be the “next task” in the medium widget, and it can fill rows in the large one.

• Events carry a calendar glyph so you can tell an appointment from something to do.
• Events are never counted in the “X of Y tasks” totals. Neither are breaks. Both still count towards your remaining time and your finish time, because they take up real time in your day.
• Events appear only when Pro is active and Show calendar events in Today is on under Settings → Calendar & Reminders. See Calendar & Reminders Sync.

Apple Watch Complications

Two complications put your day on your watch face, each available in rectangular, inline and circular families:

• Next Task: the next thing’s start time, duration, title and colour, with your day’s finish time behind a checkered flag. The inline family shortens that to the time and the title; the circular family shows how many are left.
• Stats: how many tasks you’ve completed today, how many this week, and your current streak.

Each one deep-links to its own page rather than wherever the app happened to be last: Next Task opens Today, Stats opens Stats.

The face keeps up on its own. Timeline entries are pre-generated at every task boundary, so the complication flips to the next task as each one starts and ends without the app running, and the Stats entries roll over at midnight so yesterday’s count never masquerades as today’s.

Calendar events are included here too, carrying the same calendar glyph, so “next” on your wrist means the next thing whether it is a task or a meeting. The Stats numbers count tasks only. The watch reads your calendar itself, so events are there even when your iPhone is not. See Apple Watch for the rest of the watch app.

Control Center (iOS 18+)

On iPhone with iOS 18 or later, you can add Set’s Timer control to Control Center for one-tap access. The control shows the task you’re currently timing, and tapping it opens Set straight to the Timer.

Adding the Control

1. Swipe down from the top-right corner to open Control Center
2. Tap the ”+” button in the top left, or tap “Add a Control”
3. Search for “Set” and pick the Timer control

When a timer is running, the control displays that task’s name; otherwise it reads “Open Timer”.

Live Activities (iOS 17+)

When you start the timer, Set displays a Live Activity on your Lock Screen and Dynamic Island (iPhone 14 Pro+).

Enabling Live Activities

Live Activities need two toggles, both on by default:

1. In Set: Settings → Timer → “Show Live Activity”
2. In iOS Settings: Search for “Set” or scroll to Apps → Set, then toggle on “Live Activities” (found next to Notifications)

What’s Shown

• A header with Set’s own mark, the project name, and your finish time behind a checkered flag. Paused, that corner says so instead.
• The task name across the full width of the card.
• The big timer, sharing a baseline with the smaller elapsed or remaining reading beside it. Which one is big follows your timer’s own elapsed/remaining setting.
• A linear progress bar under the time, tinted your project’s colour, full and red once you’re past your estimate.
• Dynamic Island: the compact view shows a timer glyph (a teacup for breaks) and the remaining time; the expanded view shows the project, task name, both readings and the same bar.

The bar replaced a progress ring for a reason worth knowing: a Live Activity only keeps moving for the two things iOS renders itself, the timer text and a linear progress view. Anything the app draws by hand freezes a few seconds after your screen sleeps, when iOS suspends it. That is why the old ring stopped while the time beside it carried on. The bar keeps filling while your phone is asleep.

On Apple Watch

The Live Activity declares the small activity family, so where watchOS shows it, the running timer arrives as a proper wrist-size card in the Smart Stack rather than the generic compact strip: task name, remaining time, project and the progress bar. Whether it reaches a given watch also depends on that watch’s own Live Activities setting.