Fokus Blocks

Fokus Blocks are protected time regions on your calendar. You decide what a block is for — deep work, admin, learning — and the scheduler enforces it both ways: tasks that don't match are kept out of the block, and tasks that do match are pulled into it. Blocks are constraints the Smart Scheduling solver actually obeys — which also means they need Smart Scheduling to act: with automatic runs off, blocks take effect the next time you press Optimize Schedule.

Turning it off

Fokus Blocks is on by default, so you already have the block affordances on the calendar, the Block option in the create form's type switch (Task | Event | Block), and Captain Fokus's block tools.

If you'd rather plan without it, switch it off under Settings → AI Scheduling → Fokus Blocks. That hides those affordances and stops the scheduler treating blocks as constraints — your existing blocks are kept, not deleted, and switching it back on restores them exactly as they were. Any busy mirrors on your external calendar are removed while it's off.

Creating a block

Two ways, both on the Calendar:

• Draw and switch — drag-select empty calendar space as usual, then flip the type switch centered at the top of the form from Event to Block (the switch appears when creating, not when editing).
• Option-drag (⌥ on Mac, Alt on Windows) — hold the modifier while drawing and the block form opens directly.

A block has a title, a color, a time range, and optionally a recurrence — "every weekday morning" is the classic. The quick-start presets (Deep Work, Admin, Learning, Personal) prefill a name, color, and weekday recurrence — and Deep Work and Admin also pre-set an energy filter (extensive and light respectively), so check the filters row after picking one.

Or let AI plan it: describe the block in the box at the bottom of the form — "deep work on my thesis every weekday morning 9 to 12" — and it fills the title, time, recurrence, and matching filters (resolved against your real buckets, tags, and objectives). Review, adjust, and save; Undo in the banner restores what you had. Because the filters decide what the scheduler pulls in, an AI-planned block starts attracting its matching tasks on the next auto-schedule.

Matching filters

The filters decide which tasks belong in the block: buckets, tags, energy levels, priorities, and objectives. Within one filter, any value matches; across filters, all of them must. A block with no filters accepts every task.

Two things worth knowing:

• Sub-buckets match their parent's filter — a block filtered on Work also accepts tasks from buckets nested under it.
• A task without the filtered attribute never matches. If your block filters on extensive energy, tasks with no energy level set will never be scheduled into it — give your important tasks an energy level, or let TEA enrich them.

What the scheduler does with blocks

• Reserve — tasks that don't match a block are never scheduled inside it. The block's time stays free for its purpose even when the rest of the week is packed.
• Prefer — matching tasks are pulled into their blocks, even when an earlier free slot exists that day.
• Overflow — when a block is full, matching tasks spill into normal free time. A block is a magnet, not a cage.

Blocks may not overlap each other, and an empty block simply stays empty — that's the point of protecting time. Two boundaries to know: blocks fence out tasks, not meetings — a calendar event can still land on top of a block (that's what the busy-mirror toggle below is for) — and a task you pinned by hand is left where you pinned it, inside a foreign block or outside its own.

On the calendar

Blocks render as a tinted background region everywhere — including the Kanban view's day timeline. In day and week views and on that timeline, hovering a block reveals its chrome — a bar in a darker shade of the block's color with the block's name, a live count ("3 tasks · 1 done", counting tasks that sit fully inside the occurrence), and the edit and replan buttons. It stays out of the way otherwise, so the tasks scheduled inside the block stay readable. Scheduled tasks sit on top of the tint as normal cards. The pencil opens the block for editing; deleting or disabling a block never deletes the tasks that were scheduled in it, though the next auto-schedule is free to move them elsewhere.

Dropping a task into a block schedules it there and adopts the block's identity: the task takes the block's bucket (if it had none), its tags, and its objective (when the block lists exactly one and the task has none). Energy and priority are never changed — those describe the task, not the time.

Pulling leftovers in

Unfinished tasks whose time already passed — and tasks the scheduler had to defer — are leftovers. The circular-arrow button on any block gathers the leftovers that match it and lines them up for the block's next occurrence; the scheduler then re-plans and places them. The nightly rollover also moves unfinished work forward to today, and the next auto-schedule pulls whatever matches into its block — but only this button aims leftovers at a specific block.

Captain Fokus

Everything above works from chat too:

• "Block my weekday mornings for deep work" — creates the block, recurrence and all.
• "Pull my leftovers into my next deep work block" — the replan action.
• "How should I structure my week?" — Captain Fokus analyzes your open workload (hours per bucket, energy mix, your peak hours) and proposes a block layout. Nothing is created until you confirm.

Showing blocks on your real calendar

If colleagues book over your protected time, enable Settings → AI Scheduling → Fokus Blocks → Show as busy on my calendar. Each block is mirrored as a busy event on your connected Google or Outlook calendar, so external availability checks see the reserved time — this needs at least one synced calendar connected. The mirrors are bookkeeping — they never appear inside Fokus itself, and turning the toggle (or the feature) off removes them again (as long as the calendar they live on is still connected and enabled).

Mobile

The mobile app shows your blocks as tinted regions on the day timeline — the same reserve-and-prefer schedule, glanceable on the go. Creating and editing blocks currently lives on web and in Captain Fokus.