Why time blocking falls apart
The common advice: write every task into a slot in your calendar. Sounds sensible. Rarely survives until lunch.
- The gaps between appointments. Forty minutes sit between two meetings. Too little for the big thing, too much to waste. A slot-based plan has nowhere to put that.
- Estimates are bad. What should take two hours takes four. Now not only that block is wrong, but every one after it.
- Work spanning days does not fit into a day. Things that stretch over two weeks cannot be cut into daily slices before you have started.
- Interruptions. A phone call, a sick client, a server falls over. Afterwards the plan is fiction, and rewriting it costs time again.
After three days nobody follows the plan. After that, people stop planning altogether.
A different question
Aevo does not ask "when will I do this" but "how much time do I have today, and how much did I intend to spend".
That needs two numbers. The first comes from your calendar. Aevo reads your appointments from Google Calendar, Microsoft 365 or CalDAV and knows how much unscheduled time is left. The second comes from you, as a time estimate on the task.
Together they produce the load. It does not tell you when to do what. It tells you whether your plan for today fits into the day.
A slot plan is wrong after the first interruption. A capacity calculation is not. The day is still the same size, there is simply less of it left.
What you see
- How full the day is. Appointments plus intended tasks against the hours available. If it does not add up, you see that in the morning rather than the evening.
- What fits into a gap. Forty minutes between two meetings is not a remainder but a capacity. The board shows which tiles fit.
- The time rail. A rail across the top carries what is due today. No second application for appointments.
- The day plan. The day as one track from start of work to the end, meetings fixed on it. You drag tasks from the backlog into the gaps, and the head of the plan says how much air is left. It sets no clock times: start later and everything slides along, only meetings stay put.
Effort from subtasks adds up towards the top. What you broke down into hours below appears above as a total on the tile and feeds into the day's arithmetic. More on that under break tasks down to any depth.
When it does not fit
An honest capacity figure regularly says the day is too full. You can then postpone something or pause it. Both are fine.
The difference matters. Postponing means the task keeps pressing. Each postponement raises the attention score, and from the third time the tile changes colour. Pausing with a start date means the matter rests deliberately and does not appear until that day. More on that under tasks you keep postponing.
What you need for it
Day capacity and load planning are part of Pro, as is the calendar sync. Without a calendar the calculation has no basis. Time estimates, priorities, the time rail, the attention score and the day plan for today are included in the free plan as well. Tomorrow and the two days after you plan with Pro.
The calendar connects over CalDAV, so iCloud or Nextcloud for instance, or over Microsoft 365. More on that under connect calendars over CalDAV and Microsoft 365.