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FeaturesAuto Day PlannerUpdated March 11, 2026

Plan Overflow & Automatic Deferral

Plan Overflow & Automatic Deferral

Available from v0.1.8

Overview

Every working day has a finite amount of usable focus time. When the tasks you select for the day add up to more time than your calendar can hold, Focus Engine detects the overflow and handles it automatically — keeping your plan honest and your deferred work visible.

How It Works

1. Overflow Detection

After scheduling tasks into available focus slots (in priority order), the engine calculates whether any selected tasks remain unscheduled because there is no more time to place them. This is overflow.

Overflow can occur when:

  • You have a meeting-heavy day with limited free slots.
  • The selected tasks have large estimated durations.
  • Buffer time between blocks reduces the remaining schedulable window.

2. Communicating What Fits

Focus Engine clearly separates your plan into two groups:

GroupDescription
TodayTasks that fit within your available focus time, scheduled in priority order.
TomorrowTasks that could not be accommodated today due to time constraints.

The Today section shows only work that is genuinely achievable given your calendar. No silent over-commitment.

3. The Tomorrow Section

Overflowed tasks appear in a Tomorrow section at the bottom of your Day Planner view. This section:

  • Lists each deferred task with its estimated duration.
  • Preserves the original priority ordering so higher-priority work moves to the next day first.
  • Feeds directly into the next morning's Daily Briefing, where deferred items are surfaced at the top — before new work — to maintain continuity.

Deferral & the Next Day's Briefing

Deferred tasks are not forgotten. The following morning, the Daily Briefing surfaces them first, ahead of newly arriving tasks. This ensures:

  • Work that was explicitly planned but couldn't fit is never buried.
  • You begin the next day with full awareness of what carried over.
  • Priority and momentum are preserved across days.

Relationship to Priority Scheduling

The overflow handler works in concert with the Day Planner's existing priority-aware scheduling logic. Tasks are always filled into available slots in this order:

  1. Urgent items
  2. Due today
  3. In-progress work
  4. Client-facing work
  5. Quick wins
  6. Backlog

The cut-off point — where today ends and tomorrow begins — falls naturally at the point where available time is exhausted, respecting this priority order. Lower-priority tasks are always the first to be deferred.

Notes

  • The Tomorrow section is display-only in the current release. Deferred tasks are surfaced in the next briefing automatically; no manual action is required.
  • Duration estimates used in overflow calculation follow the same defaults as the Day Planner: bug fix 60 min, feature 120 min, quick win 45 min, client work 90 min. These remain user-overridable.
  • If multiple tasks overflow on consecutive days, each day's briefing will continue to surface deferred work at the top until it is scheduled or dismissed.