A glossary of task scheduling terms

The tools that schedule tasks into a calendar have grown faster than the vocabulary used to describe them, so the same word often means different things on two competing product pages, and a feature comparison can look like a difference when it is only a naming choice. This glossary gives each common term one plain definition first, followed by a sentence on how the tools actually differ in using it, and it is written to be useful whichever product you end up choosing.

Auto-scheduling is software deciding when each task on your list happens, by reading your free time and placing tasks into it according to how long each one takes and how urgent it is. It differs from a calendar reminder, which only tells you about a time you already chose, and from a to-do app with a calendar view, where you still drag every task into place yourself.

Buffer time is a deliberate gap a scheduler leaves before or after a task, so that work is not placed edge to edge with meetings or with other tasks. Most schedulers let you set its length once for everything, and it is one of the cheapest settings to get right, because a plan with no room to finish a thought or refill a coffee tends to slip within the first hour.

First-fit placement is a scheduling method that sorts tasks by importance and then puts each one into the earliest free slot long enough to hold it, without going back to reconsider earlier placements. It is predictable, since you can usually guess where a task will land, and its known weakness is that a long task can take a large gap that several shorter tasks would have used better. Hourwright uses first-fit for that predictability.

Focus time is a block of calendar time reserved for uninterrupted work and marked as busy so that colleagues do not book meetings over it. Tools treat it differently, since some reserve a generic block and leave its content up to you, while a task scheduler fills the same time with specific tasks from your list.

Free/busy is the calendar information that says only whether a period of time is taken, without revealing what the event is or who is attending it. A scheduler needs nothing more than this to find gaps for your tasks, so a tool that asks for free/busy access is asking for considerably less than one that asks to read every event on your account.

A habit, in scheduling tools, is a recurring commitment such as a workout or a weekly review that the scheduler places within a flexible window instead of at a fixed time, and moves when something else claims that time. Reclaim popularised the term and built its product around defending habits from being booked over, while other tools treat the same thing as an ordinary recurring task with a fixed slot.

Locking a scheduled task pins it to its current time, so that the next scheduling run plans everything else around it instead of moving it. It matters most in tools with one-way sync, where locking is the way to make a manual adjustment survive the next rebuild of the plan.

One-way sync means the scheduling app owns the plan and writes it to your calendar, so an event you drag by hand in the calendar is overwritten at the next run unless you lock it first. Two-way sync means changes made in the calendar flow back into the app. Two-way is more convenient and considerably harder to build reliably, which is why several capable tools ship one-way with a clear warning.

A prerequisite is a task that has to be finished before another task can start, such as drafting before editing. A scheduler that understands prerequisites places the dependent task after the one it depends on, and the tools differ mainly in whether the feature is included at every price or reserved for a higher tier.

Replanning is rebuilding the schedule when something changes, such as a meeting moving or a task overrunning. Some tools replan continuously in the background as soon as anything changes, while others replan only when you ask them to, and the choice is less one-sided than it sounds, because a plan that rearranges itself unannounced can be harder to follow than one that only moves on request.

The scheduling range is how far into the future a tool will place tasks, sometimes called the scheduling horizon. Several tools tie it to the price, with a free tier that plans about a week ahead and paid tiers that plan two or three months out, which matters as soon as you have a deadline further away than the free range reaches.

Task splitting is breaking a task longer than any available free slot into several shorter sittings that fit the gaps you actually have, usually with a minimum length below which a sitting is not worth starting. Without it, a four-hour task in a week of meetings is simply reported as unplaceable. Some tools call the pieces chunks and Hourwright calls the process task breaking, but the mechanism is the same.

Time blocking is the practice of giving every piece of work a specific slot in your calendar instead of leaving it on a list. It can be done entirely by hand in any calendar, and How to time block with Google Calendar covers the manual method along with the maintenance problem that leads many people to automate it.

Timeboxing is setting a fixed limit on how long you will spend on a task and stopping when the time runs out, whether or not the task is finished. It is often used interchangeably with time blocking, but the emphasis differs, since time blocking is about when the work happens and timeboxing is about capping how long it may take.

Working hours are the times of the week you declare as available for scheduled work, and they are the outer boundary inside which a scheduler looks for free time. Setting them to when you genuinely start and stop, instead of an aspirational version of your week, is the single setting that most decides whether the first plan is usable.

Hourwright is an auto-scheduler for Google Calendar that reads only free/busy information and uses first-fit placement inside your working hours, splitting long tasks into sittings where a gap is too short and respecting prerequisites and buffer time as it goes. Sync runs one way, with locking for anything you want kept in place. It replans when you run it again instead of continuously, and it costs three euros a month after a 31-day trial that needs no card. What an automatic task scheduler for Google Calendar actually does walks through how these pieces fit together in practice.