Plan your day with automatic time blocking

Prior puts your open tasks into the free hours of your working days, around your calendar, and moves them when your plans change.

Automatic time blocking answers "when do I do this?". Prior looks at your open tasks, your working hours and your calendar, and places each task in a free slot, before its deadline when it has one. When a meeting appears or a task takes longer, the plan moves.

The plan is a suggestion drawn on top of your data. Prior never moves your calendar events and never writes a time to a task on its own. A block becomes real when you lock it.

#What gets planned

Your open tasks, except those that are waiting, done, or the parent of open sub-tasks (the sub-tasks are planned instead). An Inbox task is planned only if it has a date or priority P1 or P2, and a Backlog task only if it has a date. Tasks assigned to someone else are left out.

#How Prior chooses

• Order. Priority and deadline decide together, with tasks already in progress favoured. A task that blocks another always comes before it.
• Length. Your own Duration wins, whether you set it on the task or typed it in the title, as in "Plan Q4 roadmap 2h". Without one, Prior AI estimates it, or the app guesses from the title, the checklist and the description. Checked checklist items shorten the estimate. The default duration is 30 minutes.
• Splitting. A long task is cut into blocks of 25 to 90 minutes. Short tasks fill small gaps, so the long gaps stay whole.
• Deep work. Tasks that need concentration go in the part of the day you work best.
• Deadlines. A task that would miss its date is moved earlier when possible. Otherwise Prior warns you.

#What counts as busy

Prior avoids everything outside your working days and hours, your lunch, every event in a calendar that Counts as busy (with a buffer around it, and travel time when the event has a physical place), habits that have a time, and all-day events you locked, such as a holiday.

#Where you see the plan

• Today has a Your plan card with the blocks left today, the time planned and the time free.
• Calendar draws blocks as hatched boxes with a sparkle. Locked blocks are solid with a lock. A banner lists tasks that may miss their deadline or found no free time.

#When the plan moves

Prior plans again whenever your tasks, habits, calendar or settings change, and every five minutes, so a block you missed moves forward. The block in progress stays put, and blocks starting within 30 minutes keep their slot while it is free.

#Turn it on or off

Plan my tasks is a switch in the calendar's side panel and at the top of Settings → Planning. It is on by default.

#Good to know

• By default Prior plans 7 days ahead. You can choose 3, 5, 7 or 14 days.
• With Estimate with Prior AI on, the title, the start of the description and the checklist items of tasks without an estimate go to Prior AI, once per task. Your own estimate always wins.
• Prior reads Google Calendar but never writes to it.

Updated 5 November 2026