Daily Plan

Your day is already planned before you open it. Auto-scheduling places your tasks around your meetings as they arrive, so the Daily Plan is not where you build a day — it's where you disagree with the one you have, and say yes to it.

That split is the whole idea: the scheduler works out what fits, and you decide what's worth doing. Most days nothing is wrong and committing is one click.

Opening it

Press Review your daily plan on Day View. The plan opens over your wallpaper with the navbar still live, so you can reach the Reservoir and your connected tools without leaving it.

Opening runs a fresh solve. Nothing is written to your calendar until you press Commit day — the whole surface is a proposal you can walk away from.

The day as a timeline

The middle column is your day on a clock: scheduled work, immovable meetings, and the gaps between them labelled with their length. A list can't answer "will this fit?"; a 2h 15m hole between two meetings can.

• Drag a block to a different hour. It saves immediately, and Undo puts it back.
• Drag its bottom edge to change how long it takes.
• Click it to open the full task.
• Drop anything anywhere — including on top of something else. A clash is yours to make; the two draw side by side rather than one hiding the other.
• Drag across an empty slot to create something new at exactly that hour. It opens the same form the calendar does, so you can add an event or a meeting here rather than only tasks — hold ⌥/Alt to draw a Fokus block instead, and switch the form to Task if that is what you meant.

Blocks take their bucket's colour, and each carries a short reason for the hour it's in — "deep work, in your peak hours" — naming the rule you set, with the uncomfortable ones said out loud too: "outside your peak hours — the morning was full."

The readiness check

Above the numbers, one line tells you whether the plan holds up. When everything passes it says so and stops talking — silence on a good day is the point, not missing feedback.

When something is off, only the failures are spelled out, each with a one-tap fix where one honestly exists:

The last one has no button on purpose: consolidating fragmented deep work means shuffling things around meetings that can't move, and there's no version of that we'd trust to do silently.

Expand Seaworthiness for the arithmetic behind the verdict, and Compass for how much of the day points at an objective — including the goals it gives no time to at all.

Things you might want to check

Below that is what's not in the plan — as findings, not a list of everything. One line per finding with a count, capped at four, whatever the size of your backlog:

• 3 deadlines this week
• 5 tasks you keep pushing
• 2 tasks today have no time set

That last one is work you've committed to today that never got an hour, and it says which kind: "you took it off the schedule" is your own decision, "no room in the day" is the scheduler's verdict, and "not scheduled yet" means nothing has tried to place it. Expand any finding to see the items and add them to today.

Changing the plan

Change the plan opens the Available work drawer beside the day — never over it, so you can see where things will land.

• Sources — your Reservoir and each connected tool open the app's own panel. Drag any row straight onto the timeline; if it isn't a Fokus task yet, it becomes one on the drop.
• Add something on the spot — capture work Fokus doesn't know about. It's saved immediately, so it survives abandoning the session, and it lands on the day you're planning with no hour set yet, under "on today, no time set".
• Fit it in — drops a candidate into the first gap that will hold it.

Admin time, as a dial

Email and crew output aren't cards — twelve emails is one decision, not twelve. They're a dial: pick how long you want for the whole pile, deselect anything you're not doing, and the suggestion shrinks with it. Fokus remembers the number you settle on and suggests it next time.

Then choose who picks the hour:

• Let Fokus place it — a light-energy task the scheduler fits in, kept out of your peak hours automatically.
• Reserve a block — you pick the hour from the day's real gaps, and nothing else gets scheduled into it.

Pushing work out

Defer on any block asks where it should go instead:

• Tomorrow or Next week
• Backlog — off the calendar, not deleted. Nothing in planning destroys work, and nothing puts it back today either: auto-scheduling leaves it alone for the rest of the day and may pick it up again tomorrow.
• Off the schedule — the odd one out: the task keeps today and gives up its hour, and the scheduler stops placing it. For work you'll do today, just not on Fokus's terms.

It then asks why, optionally — blocked · not important now · no time · waiting on someone. You can always defer without answering; a plan must be committable without filling in a form.

The reason pays off later: "three tasks you've pushed three times, two marked blocked — are they actually blocked, or should they go?"

Committing

Commit day writes the plan and pins what it placed, so the next background solve doesn't quietly rearrange the day you just approved. Rollover clears those pins on anything left undone — a committed day holds for the day it was committed, and no longer.

If you changed things while the plan was open, the proposal it was built from is out of date; Fokus re-solves and commits without asking. That's expected, not an error.

When your day changes

A committed day doesn't stay frozen when a meeting lands on it. If the meeting is yours — you made it in Fokus, you accepted the invite, you organised it, or nobody else is invited — Fokus repairs the day straight away:

• What the meeting doesn't touch stays where it is. A task it cuts into keeps its time before and after the meeting, and the minutes it lost move as one piece to the first free place that task may go that day. A leftover shorter than half an hour goes with them rather than staying behind as a sliver.
• If there's no room left, one task moves to your next working day to make some — the least important one that can move. The scheduler then finds it a time — on that day if there's room, otherwise on another day that has some.
• Nothing else moves.

You're told what happened — "Moved Rewrite onboarding copy to later to make room for Incident call" — in a notification and in Attention, both with Undo. Undo puts back everything you haven't changed since, and works until the day ends.

An invite you haven't accepted never moves your day. It shows up in Attention as a conflict with Fix, which makes room exactly as above and leaves Undo in Attention — no second notification, since you just did it. If Fix finds no room, Attention says so instead. Accept the invite later and the day repairs itself; decline it or delete the meeting and the conflict goes away.

Work that never moves to make room:

• anything done, or that you're timing right now;
• anything that has already started;
• anything due that day;
• anything excluded from scheduling, by itself or through its bucket;
• a repeating task — moving it would move the whole series;
• anything more important than the work the meeting landed on.

A task without a priority counts as low, so it moves before anything marked medium or high. And if the work the meeting landed on is itself the least important, that's what moves.

Work you put on top of a meeting yourself stays where you put it — a later change to that meeting won't move it.

It only happens on a committed day with auto-scheduling turned on, and only for meetings that take time: all-day events, focus time and events excluded from scheduling don't count. On your phone the push carries the same Undo or Fix button.

Focusing, once the day is settled

Committing offers Start focusing? — a Fokus Session, sized to your day. It's optional in the strictest sense: the plan commits whether or not you touch it, and nothing about the day depends on it.

Pick what the session switches on, then press Start focusing:

• Focus music — on this device only, and it doesn't press play for you. If you haven't picked a playlist since you opened Fokus, the session opens the Focus music panel: choose one there and press play. If you have, the player is left as it is — music that's playing keeps playing, and a paused player stays paused until you press play.
• Slack & Teams DND — on unless you switch it off. Sets your status to Deep Fokus 🎯 and do-not-disturb on Slack and Microsoft Teams, for the length of the session rather than a fixed two hours. The same switch quiets any Android phone you're signed into, and your Mac once you've set that up.
• Immersive mode — puts Day View into immersive mode on this device: the panels go, leaving the greeting, date and clock.

A session doesn't start a timer. Timing a piece of work is still the timer's job, started on that task.

A session started here lasts as long as the first piece of work on your plan, or 25 minutes if there's none. To choose the length yourself — 25, 50 or 90 minutes — open Fokus Session from Spotlight or the Day View menu instead; that dialog has the Do Not Disturb and Focus music switches, but not immersive mode.

A session belongs to you, not to a screen. Start it on your laptop and your desktop app, any browser tab you have open and the phone app all know about it, and any of them can end it. The parts that take over a screen — immersive mode and the music — only happen on the device you started it on, so nothing is hijacked that you weren't looking at.

The phone can start, show and end a session too. An Android phone goes quiet for one; an iPhone can't be silenced by any app, but it has Shortcuts actions to start and end one. All of that is on Fokus on your phone.

The floating desktop timer isn't part of this. It follows the timer, as it always has, appearing when one starts on any of your devices — which is the right behaviour for a window whose whole job is showing a timer.

End focus here, or End session in the dialog or on your phone, stops the session everywhere and clears the do-not-disturb it set. Ending it doesn't stop the music: pause that in the player. A session that runs its full length ends on its own, and Slack and Teams lift do-not-disturb at that time without Fokus.

On desktop, Cmd/Ctrl+⇧+F works from any app: press it to start a 25-minute session with do-not-disturb and nothing else, and press it again to end whichever session is running, wherever it was started.

Desktop also goes quiet on its own while you're on a call. Fokus notices when something is using your microphone — any app, no list to maintain — and holds its own notifications until the call ends. The one thing it still shows is the offer to record the meeting, since that's the whole point of noticing.

On your phone

Planning runs on the phone too, in the same morning window. It's the same session and the same commit — the day on a timeline, long-press a block to move it, drag its edge to resize, tap it to push it out with a reason, and tap ＋ to pull work in.

The one difference is how you add work: instead of opening a source panel and dragging, the phone gives you a list grouped by where the work came from, and you take an item with a tap. The scheduler picks the hour either way, so taking something means "include it today" rather than "put it at 10am".