Smart Scheduling

Smart Scheduling is the reason your task cards have times on them without you dragging anything. It looks at your open tasks and finds each one a slot that respects your meetings, working hours, energy patterns, priorities, and deadlines — recalculating whenever life happens.

Where it lives

Open Kanban or Calendar, hover near the top, and click the sparkles — AI Quick Actions:

• The Smart Scheduling toggle turns automatic runs on or off.
• Optimize Schedule runs it right now — the "just fix my day" button.
• Below it, the Morning Briefing and End-of-Day Review share the same popover.

When it runs by itself

You rarely need the manual button. The scheduler re-plans automatically when:

• new tasks arrive (created by you, an agent, or an integration),
• conflicts appear — a meeting lands on top of a planned task,
• your external calendar changes — meetings synced in from Google or Outlook (added, moved, or deleted) trigger a re-plan within seconds,
• you finish early — completing a task shrinks its block to the time actually used and the rest of the day compacts forward,
• tasks roll over — yesterday's unfinished work needs a new home today.

How it decides

A constraint solver weighs some twenty rules; the ones you'll feel day to day:

• Meetings win. Tasks flow around calendar events, never over them.
• Working hours and rest hours are sacred — no tasks at lunch, none at 2 AM.
• Peak hours attract demanding work. Tasks marked extensive energy gravitate to the hours you flagged as high-energy; light tasks fill the valleys.
• Deadlines pull. As a due date approaches, its task muscles toward the front. Hard deadlines are non-negotiable; soft ones bend only under real pressure — finishing late costs the plan far more than any convenience.
• Priority breaks ties, and estimated time decides what fits where.
• Blocks reserve and attract. Where you've set up Fokus Blocks, tasks that don't match a block are never scheduled inside it, and matching tasks are pulled in even when an earlier slot is free — spilling into normal free time once the block is full.

Staying in control

The scheduler proposes; you dispose. Every task offers three levels of say-so:

• Pin it — drag a block to a time (or set one manually) and it's locked; the scheduler plans around it. Look for the small padlock.
• Exclude it — flip Auto-Schedule: Included off in the task view and the task keeps its date but never gets auto-placed.
• Keep the Reservoir out — undated Reservoir tasks are auto-placed by default; flip on Exclude Reservoir from scheduling in Settings → AI Scheduling to leave them untouched until they get a date.

Long tasks can also be chunked — split into multiple sittings — via the chunking option on the task. With Auto-Chunking on (Settings → AI Scheduling), the enrichment agent pre-chunks new 2-hour-plus tasks into 60-minute parts for you; whatever you set on the task itself always wins.

When a day genuinely doesn't fit everything, the scheduler defers the least urgent tasks instead of overpacking — deferred tasks show a small Deferred badge explaining why, and get replanned as soon as capacity frees up. A task whose hard deadline has already passed is also deferred rather than silently squeezed in somewhere: a hard deadline that's gone by can't be met anymore, so Fokus surfaces the task with a hard deadline passed badge and leaves the decision — reschedule, soften the deadline, or complete it — to you.

Tune how Fokus schedules

Deeper preferences live in Settings → AI Scheduling:

• Working Hours & Days — the outer bounds of any plan. Work the same hours all week, or flip on Different hours each day to give every weekday its own start and end — Monday 9–5, Tuesday 10–3, Wednesday off. A day you don't work is switched off with its own toggle; breaks within a day stay Rest Hours.
• Peak Hours / Rest Hours — your energy map: when deep work should land, and when nothing should (sleep, lunch). Once you've completed enough tasks, Fokus also suggests peak hours from when you actually finish things — apply the suggestion with one click.
• Task Buffer & Recovery Buffer — breathing room between blocks, and a longer break (15 or 30 minutes, your pick) after demanding ones.
• Context-Switch Buffer — off by default; when on, adds a short gap whenever the plan jumps between deep work and light tasks.
• Auto-Chunking — off by default; when on, long new tasks arrive pre-split into parts (per-task chunking settings always win).
• Fokus Blocks — on by default; recurring time reserved for a kind of work, which the solver keeps non-matching tasks out of. Its Show as busy on my calendar sub-toggle stays off unless you turn it on.
• Scheduling Window — how many days ahead Fokus plans (default: a week).
• Rollover — whether unfinished tasks automatically move forward.
• Flexible scheduling — allow slots outside working hours when things genuinely don't fit.
• Exclude Reservoir from scheduling — keep undated backlog tasks as a holding pen instead of auto-placing them.

Time off — vacations & holidays

The scheduler should know when you're not working, too. Set your days off in Settings → AI Scheduling → Vacations & Holidays:

• Vacation days. Add a date range — with an optional label like "Summer trip" — and nothing gets auto-scheduled across it. Add as many as you need.
• Public holidays. Pick your country (and region/state where it matters) and turn on Treat public holidays as days off. Fokus loads that location's public holidays automatically — no typing dates. Observe a different set than the default? Turn off the holidays you usually work on and they stay normal working days.