Smart Scheduling

Let Fokus automatically place work based on deadlines, capacity, events, buffers, and your working preferences.

Overview

Smart Scheduling is the system that turns enriched tasks into a realistic calendar plan. In the current implementation, Fokus prepares your tasks, events, working preferences, and existing assignments in the backend, then sends that data to a dedicated scheduling engine that finds the best available placement.

This is solver-based scheduling, not generic AI chat output

Smart Scheduling works alongside the other AI systems in Fokus, but the actual placement logic is constraint-based. Fokus uses task context from features like TEA, then applies an optimization engine that respects your deadlines, availability, and schedule rules.

What Smart Scheduling Uses

When Fokus prepares a schedule, it can take all of the following into account:

Task duration, priority, energy level, bucket, do date, and due date.
Hard and soft deadlines.
Existing scheduled work that should stay fixed.
Calendar events, including recurring events and exception instances.
Working hours, working days, and rest periods such as lunch or sleep blocks.
Peak hours derived from your chronotype or custom peak-hour settings.
Standard buffers, recovery buffers, event buffers, and context-switch spacing.
Separate WORK and PERSONAL scheduling buckets.

If a task has chunking enabled, Fokus can split it into smaller parts before scheduling so a large task can fit across multiple openings instead of competing for one long uninterrupted block.

How It Works In Practice

Prepare the scheduling window

Fokus gathers incomplete parent tasks, relevant calendar events, your scheduling preferences, and any previous auto-scheduled placements it should try to preserve.

Check whether everything can fit

Before solving, Fokus compares task demand with available capacity in your current scheduling window. The default window is a week ahead, but the actual range follows your settings.

Defer lower-value work when capacity is exceeded

If there is too much work for the available time, Fokus can defer some tasks before solving instead of forcing an unrealistic calendar.

Solve for the best placement

A dedicated scheduling service places the remaining tasks into time slots while avoiding conflicts and optimizing quality factors such as deadlines, priority order, stability, and energy-to-time matching.

Apply the result and notify you

When the schedule is ready, Fokus updates the affected tasks, stores chunked schedules when needed, and can send progress, completion, risk, or deferral notifications.

What The Scheduler Protects First

Not every task is treated equally. Fokus assigns scheduling tiers so the most important or least flexible work is protected first.

Pinned tasks stay fixed when you have locked them in place or manually scheduled them.
Hard deadline tasks are prioritized ahead of normal work and must finish before their deadline.
Rollover tasks that were missed on earlier days are promoted ahead of ordinary tasks.
Soft deadline tasks are still prioritized, but with more flexibility.
Normal tasks are the most movable.

This is one of the reasons Smart Scheduling feels more realistic than a simple first-fit calendar filler. It does not only look for empty time. It ranks the work that deserves protection.

When There Is Not Enough Time

Fokus includes intelligent deferral in the current backend implementation. If your demand is higher than the available capacity in the scheduling window, the system can leave some work unscheduled on purpose instead of creating an impossible plan.

The deferral analysis favors keeping important work in the active schedule and is more willing to defer tasks that are:

lower priority,
farther from their due date,
in an already overloaded bucket, or
newer and less established than older work.

Pinned tasks, hard-deadline tasks, and rollover tasks are protected from this deferral pass. If work is deferred, Fokus can notify you and keep the reasoning attached to the scheduling result.

Automatic Behaviors Around The Schedule

Smart Scheduling is not only a one-time planner. It also supports ongoing maintenance around the calendar.

If a task overlaps with another task or calendar event, Fokus can detect the conflict and trigger rescheduling.
If a deadline is at risk, Fokus can generate warning notifications instead of silently failing.
Overnight, incomplete overdue tasks can roll over to the new day automatically.
After too many rollovers, a task can become flexible so it is no longer forced onto a specific day.
Previously auto-scheduled tasks are treated as prior assignments, which helps the scheduler avoid unnecessary churn when it recalculates.

No separate Smart Scheduling screen is required

In the current product structure, Smart Scheduling is mostly experienced through task placement, planner updates, and notifications rather than through one dedicated workspace. You see the result in your plan more than in a standalone control panel.

Where It Fits With The Other AI Systems

Task Enrichment Agent (TEA) can infer missing task metadata such as duration, priority, energy, and bucket.
Captain Fokus can help trigger scheduling-related workflows from chat.
Objective Decomposition Agent (ODA) can turn large goals into tasks that Smart Scheduling can then place.

Together, these systems cover the full path from rough idea to scheduled execution.

Important Behaviors

Smart Scheduling uses 15-minute time grains by default in the current implementation.
WORK tasks can be restricted to working hours and working days, while rest hours are treated as hard no-schedule blocks.
Chronotype affects peak hours, which the scheduler uses to prefer placing energy-matched work at better times.
Recovery and context-switch buffers help avoid back-to-back plans that look possible on paper but feel unrealistic in practice.
Chunked tasks can be applied back to the parent task as a combined schedule with stored sub-blocks.