# Plan by your energy, not by the gaps in your calendar. Source: https://www.secondbrain.media/guide/calendar Language: en Spanish version: https://www.secondbrain.media/guide/calendar.es.md --- An ordinary calendar shows you where there is room. That is not enough: at four in the afternoon there is room and you are not performing. The secondbrain planner lays your week out over the real curve of your day — your peak, your lunch, the dip that follows — and forces you to choose with a quota instead of handing you an endless list. ## The calendar: month, week and drag Your events and your tasks live on the same grid. Month view to read the shape of the period, week view to work. - Drag a task onto a day to plan it; drag it onto an hour to reserve the block. - Drag a whole deliverable and it is scheduled as a single block with all of its tasks nested inside. - Events from your connected calendars show up alongside, and the planner respects them: it will not propose working on top of a meeting. - An event can be linked to a task, so what you booked and what you have to do are not two separate objects. _The week, with what is scheduled and what is due up top. On the left, what has no date yet: drag it onto a day and it is set._ ## The same calendar on your phone The calendar is one of the five tabs in the mobile app, and it shows the same things as here: your events, the ones from your connected calendars, the tasks that come due, the recaps you recorded and the days you closed. _On the phone: the month with the selected day listed underneath, and the week with its columns and its all-day strip._ - Four views —day, 3 days, week and month— and you move between dates by swiping. - In day and 3-day views you press and hold an event to move it to another hour or day; on an empty spot you mark the slot with your finger and the event is created there. - Creating and editing is a full-screen form, with the native date and time pickers. - The planner is not on the phone: laying a week out takes a grid that needs a big screen. The detail is in the mobile app. ## The theory: a day is not an even grid Most tools hand you a flat day: eight identical one-hour slots. Your head does not work like that, and planning as if it did is why Monday's plan does not survive Tuesday. We did not invent the shape of the day: it comes from circadian research applied to work and from the idea of a chronotype — the trait measured since 1976 with Horne and Östberg's questionnaire, and today with Roenneberg's MCTQ; Daniel Pink popularized it in When. The peak, the trough and the rebound exist for everyone, but each person has them at a different hour. See the foundations of the framework. A real day has this shape, and the planner uses all of it: 1. **The peak** — A single window of about three hours where your head is at its best. It is the only stretch reserved for hard work, and the first thing protected. Three hours is what you can hold in a row without burning out. 2. **Lunch** — Not a gap: a cut. Nothing is scheduled there. 3. **The dip** — The three quarters of an hour after eating. Digestion does not negotiate. The planner only goes there when it has no choice, and it tells you. 4. **The second wave** — After the dip there is energy again, with less edge than the peak. That is where light work goes: coordination, follow-up, maintenance. 5. **The buffer** — The last thirty minutes of the day are never planned. They absorb everything that ran long. A plan without a buffer breaks the first time something takes longer — which is to say, always. > **The peak is yours, not your schedule's** > > The window where you perform is not clipped by your working hours. If you peak from 8 to 11 and start work at 10, you still peak at 8: the only consequence is that nothing can be scheduled there. That distinction matters, because it is what stops the planner from "correcting" your peak so it fits the calendar. ## Choosing your peak Picking your peak is picking your chronotype, and here it takes three clicks instead of a questionnaire. You configure it once: three templates — the same three-hour window with a different start, one per chronotype — and a manual option for people who already know exactly when they perform. - **Morning — from 8** — The early chronotype: you are at your best right as you start. It is the most common pattern and the one that fights least with meetings, which tend to land later. - **Midday — from 10** — The middle one, the most frequent of the three: you ramp up toward the end of the morning, once the day has started but before you eat. - **Afternoon — from 15** — The late chronotype, which runs the day in reverse: you are at your best on the second wave. Also the pattern for anyone whose morning belongs to other people. - **Manual** — You pick the exact window, start and end. For peaks that fit no template, or for split days. You also configure your working day: start and end, lunch window, how long your dip lasts (0, 30, 45, 60 or 90 minutes) and which days of the week you work. With that, the planner knows where it can and cannot go. _The planner does not spread work over even slots: it spreads it over your curve. The peak is painted onto the calendar, and the hard work lands there and nowhere else._ ## The 1-3-5 quota · Hobby: the week fits in a size The planner will not let you put everything in. It starts from a quota, and that is the deliberately uncomfortable part: - 1 critical — the deliverable that defines the week. If only this happens, the week was worth it. - 3 impact — the projects that move the needle. - 5 operational — coordination, follow-up, maintenance. What does not move the needle, but hurts if it is not done. What does not fit gets postponed. And postponing is exactly the decision the planner forces you to make on Monday, instead of leaving you a list of thirty items you already know you won't do and that will make you feel bad every time you look at it. The quota is a starting point, not dogma: everyone adjusts their own — up to nine per level — and the planner remembers. The 1-3-5 numbers come from blog productivity, but what holds the idea up is not the number: it is that limiting how much work is started at once shortens how long each piece takes to finish. It is explained in the foundations of the framework. ## How what you picked gets laid out Once you have chosen what goes in, placement is automatic and follows explicit rules: - Deep work goes to the peak. Critical and impact are only placed in the part of your peak window that also falls inside your working day. - Light work goes to what is left. Operational items are spread across the rest of the workable time, outside the peak. - Blocks are 30, 60 or 90 minutes. More than ninety minutes in a row is not one block, it is two: the method says split it. - The dip is used last. Only if nothing else is left, and it is marked as such. - Outside working hours is the last resort. If the working week no longer fits, it proposes between 7 and 22 — and says so — because proposing Tuesday at seven in the evening beats leaving the task unplaced and undecided. ## Who executes changes how much room it takes Planning without knowing who executes is useless. A task of yours eats a stretch of work; one someone else executes eats ten minutes of follow-up. They are two different things and the calendar has to say so. - **Mine** — I do it. Reserves a real block of work: 60 minutes by default if it is deep, 30 if it is light. - **Waiting on** — Someone else executes and I check. Reserves 15 or 30 minutes of follow-up, not a stretch of work. It is what makes the week fit. Tasks that reached you through a linked person in the Atlas are assumed to belong to someone else; everything else is yours. One click corrects it. A deliverable of your own reserves half an hour per task, capped at three hours: a fifteen-task deliverable cannot eat the whole day in one go. If someone else executes it, it reserves the same as any follow-up. ## Calendar integrations All three are optional and only connect when you authorize them. None is required to use the planner. Task sync with ClickUp lives in Tasks and detection. - **Google Calendar** — Reads and writes calendar events to show them alongside your tasks and to create or update events when you schedule a task. - **Microsoft / Outlook Calendar** — The same two-way calendar sync, via Microsoft Graph. - **Apple Calendar** — iCal subscription: we read your events to show them inside your workspace, and you can subscribe to your Secondbrain tasks from Apple Calendar. > **Apple Calendar, in both directions** > > Beyond reading your events, secondbrain publishes an iCal feed of your tasks. Subscribing to that feed from Apple Calendar, Google Calendar or any iCal-speaking client puts your planned tasks in the same place you already look at your day — phone included, with nothing to install.