The auto-planner

The rules the auto-planner follows to fill free focus time with your tasks, add check blocks for finished agent sessions, and report what didn't fit.

The auto-planner fills your free focus time with your open tasks, most urgent first. It runs whenever a view needs a plan, starting from the current time, and never stores its result: the plan changes as soon as the tasks change.

Free focus time

For each work day, the planner starts from the focus hours in Settings → Planning and removes:

the break (Keep free);
every calendar activity, plus 10 minutes before and after it;
every open task you put at a time in the week view, as long as its estimate, plus 10 minutes before and after it;
on today, the time that has already passed, rounded up to the next quarter hour.

Only gaps of at least 30 minutes count as free focus time. The sum of these gaps is the week's capacity, as in 22.5 h planned of 26 h focus time left.

What gets planned

First, check blocks: for every agent session that finished and waits for review, a 45-minute block to check the result, such as Check DEV-21. Checks go into the earliest free time.

Then your tasks. A task is planned when all of these hold:

its status is Todo or In progress;
it isn't handed to Claude Code or Codex: it's yours, or nobody is set;
it has a due date, a planned date, or Urgent or High priority;
you haven't put it at a time yourself: then it stays where you put it.

Backlog tasks, tasks in review, and tasks without any date or high priority are left out.

In which order

The tasks go in this order, each one placed before the next is looked at:

overdue tasks before the rest;
then by due date, earliest first (tasks without one come after those with one);
then by planned date;
then by priority, Urgent first;
then by age, older tasks first.

How much time, and where

Length: the task's estimate, rounded to quarter hours, at least 15 minutes. For a task In progress with sub-tasks, only the share of open sub-tasks counts, but at least a quarter of the estimate.
Blocks: at most 2 hours each, and at least 30 minutes unless less than that remains, with 10 minutes between blocks. A longer task is split over several blocks (Split WRK-31 into 2 blocks).
Where: the earliest free gap that fits. A task planned for a later day starts on that day at the earliest.
What doesn't fit: time the range can't hold is reported, such as WRK-36 Send the Q4 plan to the team needs 2 h and there's no free slot left this week.

Reading the result

The week view's Auto-plan panel explains the plan in a few notes:

DEV-21 finished, so 45 min to check it was added today at 15:00;
WRK-27 is overdue, planned today at 09:00;
Split WRK-31 into 2 blocks.

It also shows the planned hours against the capacity, split by area, and lists Rules:

Focus time Mon to Fri, 09:00 to 17:00;
Keep 12:30 to 13:30 free;
Deadlines first, then priority;
Finished agent sessions get a check block;
Tasks for Claude Code and Codex are left to them.

Things to know

The plan is a suggestion. Focus blocks aren't events: they don't block anything, can't be dragged, and don't appear on the month view.
A later week gets what the earlier days leave over, because the planner always fills from now on.
Deadlines set the order, not a limit. When there's no room before a task's deadline, its blocks land after it without a warning; the Auto-plan notes only flag deadlines that have already passed.
Agents see the same plan with get_agenda, which also reports the free focus time left per day and the overdue tasks.