Time Blocking
Once you’ve learned foundational philosophy behind our guiding, forgiving approach – embracing the fact that the future is inherently uncertain – and understood how to work with future tasks and setting up reminders (an essential next step), let’s build on that in this article on Time Blocking.
Time blocking is about planning your tasks and habits into your day around and in between your meetings, appointments, and other duties.
Why use time blocking?
Time blocking is an optional feature, not one Lunatask is fundamentally built around, unlike some other apps. After covering the concepts in our previous two articles, you might wonder why we even offer time blocking – doesn’t it go against what we teach, reintroducing the problem we’re trying to solve? ⁉️
It can indeed seem like that at first, but think of it as just another tool in your toolbox – or an optional third layer for days when you need it. Those days might be rare, none at all, or most may be like that – depending on your workload, other factors, but also on you as a person.
When your day feels scattered
When you sit down to work, but your attention keeps jumping between emails, tasks, and random ideas, giving structure to your day may help keep you focused on a task – knowing you’ll eventually get to those emails later, since you’ve already set aside time for them.
When your day is full of meetings or appointments
With your calendar filled with meetings, calls, or appointments, leaving only small pockets of time in between, time blocking can help realistically evaluate the available time you have, what fits in and what doesn’t – to avoid overcommitting, starting tasks you won’t be able to finish, and help better prioritize your work.
When you keep postponing important tasks
Long or uncomfortable tasks often get ignored or postponed, as one might have a tendency to avoid them even when they’re important. Lunatask already helps by surfacing them and gradually moving them higher in your list as days go by – but that might still not be enough. By assigning it a time, it becomes a commitment rather than just an intention – timers help in a similar way.
These are just a few examples, but time blocking can be helpful for certain challenges you’re dealing with – or it may simply fit your preferred working style.
So, while we teach a different, more human, forgiving approach – recognizing and embracing that the future and priorities always change, while dates and rigid plans fail to meet the eventual reality or lead to a sense of failure – time blocking still has its place in Lunatask.
It’s simply another useful tool in your toolbox – there when you need it 🌟
How to plan tasks into my day?
On desktop
To open the calendar in Lunatask, press the calendar icon in the main menu at the top. Alternatively, you can toggle whether the calendar is open by pressing CMD+S (on Mac) or Ctrl+S (on other platforms).
Then, drag your tasks directly from your task list onto the calendar to plan them into your day as you see fit, or drag across an empty time slot to create a new task.
When the sidebar is resized wide enough, tomorrow appears – allowing you to plan your next day hour by hour.
On mobile
To plan a task into your day, either open its details and select the option there, or long-press the task in your list to access a quick actions menu.
How to plan or schedule habits into my day?
To one-time plan or have them scheduled automatically, see to our dedicated article on habit scheduling.
On desktop, resize time blocks by dragging their bottom edge and move them with your cursor. On mobile, tap and hold a finger to switch to edit mode.
Wait, there’s more!
While mainly built for time blocking, its calendar-like interface goes beyond that – letting you connect external calendars, join meetings with a single click, create notes for events, and more.
Learn more in our Today Calendar article about all its features, along with helpful tips and how to use them 👈
FAQ
I have an appointment in a week – can I add a start time to my task?
Task lists and time blocking are meant for your to-dos, and the more you go into the future, the fuzzier it becomes regarding when you will work on them – that’s natural, okay, and Lunatask embraces that.
There are different degrees of certainty in how you plan your to-dos for today compared to Friday five days from now. Who knows what other priorities and things pop up between now and then, right? Likely, the plan you create today for your Friday will be outdated before Friday comes – why make it then?
Events like “Appointment with a doctor” are fixed in time and should live in your calendar (e.g. Google, iCloud, or Outlook Calendar), not in your task list – you can then sync them into Lunatask using our calendar integrations 👈
To-dos, on the other hand, are meaningless to plan minute by minute long into the future, as such a rigid approach usually fails to reflect the eventual reality.
When I complete a task, some of my time blocks disappear
When completing a task, past time blocks are marked as complete, and future ones are removed.
Think about it this way: You have a task, decide to work on it for 2 hours in the morning, and then 2 hours at 3 PM after lunch and some meetings – but you’ve been very productive today and finished the task at 10 AM. Now, you want to see that you have a free window at 3 PM, right?
There’s no reason for that future time block to exist anymore – it doesn’t reflect anything real, as the task is already complete.
When I update time block length, the estimate doesn’t change
This is expected. Just because you decided to work on a task two hours before lunch doesn’t mean it will take two hours to complete. You might work on the task also later in the day or tomorrow in another time block.
It works the same way the other way around – you might have a two-hour task, but decide to create a three-hour time block on the calendar (just in case or for whatever other reason).
For many small tasks (like 15-minute tasks), the time block length will often match the estimate. That’s also why the default length for newly created time blocks matches the task’s estimate, but it’s a loose relationship that isn’t always kept in sync in both directions, as explained here.
Always keep the remaining time needed to complete the task up to date manually – the app can’t truly know.
Lunatask isn’t designed with “smart” behaviors that work only 80% of the time, while surprising you, annoying you, or doing something unexpected in the remaining 20%. Trying to be “smart” and somehow automatically sync time block length with remaining time, potentially overriding the value you manually set, that’s tricky – it wouldn’t work in practice.