Why time blocking falls apart
The common advice is to write every task into a slot in your calendar. It sounds sensible and rarely survives until lunch. Four reasons why:
- 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 sensibly be cut into daily slices before you have started.
- Interruptions. A phone call, a sick client, a server that falls over. Afterwards the whole plan is fiction, and rewriting it costs time again.
The result is familiar: after three days the plan is something you no longer follow, and you stop planning altogether.
A different question
Aevo asks a different question. Not "when will I do this" but "how much time do I actually have today, and how much did I intend to spend".
That needs two numbers. The first comes from your calendar: Aevo reads your appointments over CalDAV or Microsoft 365 and therefore knows how much unscheduled time the day still holds. The second comes from you: every task carries a time estimate.
Together they produce the load. It does not tell you when to do what. It tells you whether what you have taken on for today fits into the day at all.
It is a small difference with a large effect. A slot plan is wrong after the first interruption. A capacity calculation stays right: 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 that does not add up, you see it in the morning rather than in 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 there.
- The time rail. A rail across the top carries what is due today, so appointments do not live in a second application.
Effort from subtasks adds up towards the top. If you have broken something down realistically in hours, the total appears on the tile above and feeds into the day's arithmetic: break tasks down to any depth.
When it does not fit
An honest capacity figure regularly produces the result that the day is too full. There are then exactly two options, and both are fine: postpone something, or pause it.
The difference matters. Postponing means the task keeps pressing. Each postponement raises the attention score, and from the third time the tile changes colour. What you put off gets louder rather than quieter. Pausing with a start date means the matter deliberately rests and does not appear until that day. More on this: tasks you keep postponing.
So the overload is visible without your having to click it away, and the difference between "this is weighing on me" and "this comes later" is represented in the tool.
What you need for it
Day capacity and load planning are part of Pro, as is the calendar sync without which the calculation would have no basis. Time estimates on tasks, priorities, the time rail and the attention score are included in the free plan as well.
The calendar connects over CalDAV, so iCloud or Nextcloud for instance, or over Microsoft 365: connect calendars over CalDAV and Microsoft 365.