Planning Around Fixed Events: Classes, Shifts and Appointments
· Maksym Bardakh Ivko
When the calendar is already full of things you cannot move, planning is not about finding time. It is about seeing which gaps are usable and which are not.
Some hours are not available, and pretending otherwise breaks the plan
A student with four classes and a shift, or anyone whose week is set by a rota, does not have a blank calendar to fill. The usable time sits in fragments between fixed commitments, and a twenty-minute gap between two classes cannot hold an hour of reading.
How to plan a day like that
- Enter the fixed things first, including travel. A 9am class with a thirty-minute commute starts at 8:30.
- Set daily boundaries. Sleep and meals are commitments too. Without them the plan quietly eats them.
- Sort the remaining gaps by length. Short gaps take small, startable work. Long gaps take the task that needs a run-up.
- Match work to gap, not to mood. The reading goes in the ninety-minute gap even if the twenty-minute one arrives first.
- Re-check when the rota changes. A shift swap changes which gaps exist, so the plan has to be recomputed rather than nudged.
What Flowo does with this
Fixed events, habits, category windows and daily boundaries are the inputs Flowo schedules around. It places each task in a gap that can actually hold it, and when the timetable changes it recomputes instead of asking you to drag blocks. Nothing is assumed about what kind of day you have.
Related: re-planning a day that has slipped, and what the planner actually does.
Flowo is free to download on the App Store for iPhone and on Google Play for Android, with optional in-app purchases.