Plan by your energy, not by the gaps in your calendar.

Month, week and drag

Your events and your tasks live on the same grid. Month view to read the shape of the period, week view to work.

• Drag a task onto a day to plan it; drag it onto an hour to reserve the block.
• Drag a whole deliverable and it is scheduled as a single block with all of its tasks nested inside.
• Events from your connected calendars show up alongside, and the planner respects them: it will not propose working on top of a meeting.
• An event can be linked to a task, so what you booked and what you have to do are not two separate objects.
• In week view an event stretches from its top or bottom edge to change its time; you confirm before it is saved.
• You record the meeting from the event itself, and the recap is born tied to that event.
• An event with a time alerts you ten minutes before, on your phone and even with the app closed. From the event you pick another moment, several or none; the Calendar events alert, in your settings, changes it or turns it off for all of them.
• What someone else organizes, or lives in a read-only calendar, shows striped and cannot be edited: someone else's invitation can only be declined. A cancelled meeting stays grey and struck through, and does not alert.
• Busy time from other workspaces paints in grey what you already have scheduled in your other spaces. And when you save an event that overlaps something —here or in another workspace— it tells you, without stopping you from saving it.

The same calendar on your phone

The calendar is one of the five tabs in the mobile app, and it shows the same things as here: your events, the ones from your connected calendars, the tasks that come due, the recaps you recorded and the days you closed.

• Four views —day, 3 days, week and month— and you move between dates by swiping.
• In day and 3-day views you press and hold an event to move it to another hour or day; on an empty spot you mark the slot with your finger and the event is created there.
• Creating and editing is a full-screen form, with the native date and time pickers.
• The planner is not on the phone: laying a week out takes a grid that needs a big screen.

The detail is in the mobile app.

The theory: a day is not an even grid

Most tools hand you a flat day: eight identical one-hour slots. Your head does not work like that, and planning as if it did is why Monday's plan does not survive Tuesday.

We did not invent the shape of the day: it comes from circadian research applied to work and from the idea of a chronotype — the trait measured since 1976 with Horne and Östberg's questionnaire, and today with Roenneberg's MCTQ; Daniel Pink popularized it in When. The peak, the trough and the rebound exist for everyone, but each person has them at a different hour. See Plan, in the framework.

A real day has this shape, and the planner uses all of it:

1. 1
   The peakA single window of about three hours where your head is at its best. It is the only stretch reserved for hard work, and the first thing protected. Three hours is what you can hold in a row without burning out.
2. 2
   LunchNot a gap: a cut. Nothing is scheduled there.
3. 3
   The dipThe three quarters of an hour after eating. Digestion does not negotiate. The planner only goes there when it has no choice, and it tells you.
4. 4
   The second waveAfter the dip there is energy again, with less edge than the peak. That is where light work goes: coordination, follow-up, maintenance.
5. 5
   The bufferThe last thirty minutes of the day are never planned. They absorb everything that ran long. A plan without a buffer breaks the first time something takes longer — which is to say, always.

Choosing your peak

Picking your peak is picking your chronotype, and here it takes three clicks instead of a questionnaire. You configure it once: three templates — the same three-hour window with a different start, one per chronotype — and a manual option for people who already know exactly when they perform.

You also configure your working day: start and end, lunch window, how long your dip lasts (0, 30, 45, 60 or 90 minutes) and which days of the week you work. With that, the planner knows where it can and cannot go. It is the same setting as Your energy, in Settings → Profile and on your phone: change it in one place and it holds in both.

The 1-3-5 quota · Hobby: the week fits in a size

The planner will not let you put everything in. It starts from a quota, and that is the deliberately uncomfortable part:

• 1 critical — the deliverable that defines the week. If only this happens, the week was worth it.
• 3 impact — the projects that move the needle.
• 5 operational — coordination, follow-up, maintenance. What does not move the needle, but hurts if it is not done.

What does not fit gets postponed. And postponing is exactly the decision the planner forces you to make on Monday, instead of leaving you a list of thirty items you already know you won't do and that will make you feel bad every time you look at it.

The quota is a starting point, not dogma: everyone adjusts their own — up to nine per level — and the planner remembers.

The 1-3-5 numbers come from blog productivity, but what holds the idea up is not the number: it is that limiting how much work is started at once shortens how long each piece takes to finish. It is explained in Plan, in the framework.

How what you picked gets laid out

Once you have chosen what goes in, placement is automatic and follows explicit rules:

• Deep work goes to the peak. Critical and impact are only placed in the part of your peak window that also falls inside your working day.
• Light work goes to what is left. Operational items are spread across the rest of the workable time, outside the peak.
• Blocks are 30, 60 or 90 minutes. More than ninety minutes in a row is not one block, it is two: the method says split it.
• The dip is used last. Only if nothing else is left, and it is marked as such.
• Outside working hours is the last resort. If the working week no longer fits, it proposes between 7 and 22 — and says so — because proposing Tuesday at seven in the evening beats leaving the task unplaced and undecided.

Who executes changes how much room it takes

Planning without knowing who executes is useless. A task of yours eats a stretch of work; one someone else executes eats ten minutes of follow-up. They are two different things and the calendar has to say so.

Tasks that reached you through a linked person in the Atlas are assumed to belong to someone else; everything else is yours. One click corrects it.

A deliverable of your own reserves half an hour per task, capped at three hours: a fifteen-task deliverable cannot eat the whole day in one go. If someone else executes it, it reserves the same as any follow-up.

Connecting your calendar

All three are optional and only connect when you authorize them. None is required to use the planner. Task sync with ClickUp and Jira lives in Tasks and detection.

On a computer they all connect in the same place: the workspace switcher, top right → Edit workspace → the Calendar tab. You can also get there from the gear next to the calendar title. You have to be the owner or an admin of the space. On your phone, from the Calendar tab menu → Connect a calendar: Google and Microsoft are authorized in the phone's browser, which is what they require.

Your tasks, inside your calendar

The above brings your events here. This one goes the other way: secondbrain publishes an iCal address with your tasks, and you subscribe to it from the calendar you already look at — phone included, with nothing to install.

You copy the address once: workspace switcher → Edit workspace → Calendar, and open the iCal subscription (read-only) block. It is already generated; you only have to hit Copy.

What data each one touches