Tourmaline

Your life is dynamic, so your schedule should be too.

You say what needs doing, how long it takes and by when. Tourmaline works out when you do it, and plans again whenever something changes.

You get your own copy of a sample week to change as you like. No sign-up, and nothing about you is stored. It is deleted after 7 days without a visit.

Want your own? Self-host it.

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Your week, planned. Events stay where you put them. Tasks fill the free time between them, each before its deadline.
Add a task, not a time. Give it a length and a due date. Tourmaline picks the time, so you never hunt for a free slot.
Big tasks, broken up. Eight hours of project work becomes one- to two-hour blocks, spread evenly through the week instead of one long day.
Set it once. Lectures, workouts, lunch: make anything repeat daily or weekly, on the days you pick. Each one is planned on its own.
What matters keeps its time. Give each task a priority. When the week gets tight, lower-priority tasks make room first, and the important ones stay where they are.
Warned in time. Twenty hours of work due tomorrow won't fit. Instead of overbooking you, Tourmaline keeps it in the queue, so you know today.
Missed it? Just say so. When a block doesn't happen, one click marks it missed and its time goes back into the plan, somewhere free before the deadline. You never rebuild your week by hand.
Sort it by colour. Put items into categories, each with its own colour, and hide the ones you don't need right now to see just that part of your week.
See how your weeks went. Each week shows how much of the task time you planned got done or missed, and where the done time went, by category.

How it works

Say you have a report to write. It's about three hours of work, and it's due Friday.

  1. 1

    You add it once. Give it a name, the three hours and the Friday deadline. You don't pick a time: Tourmaline finds three free hours before Friday, around your meetings and outside the hours you keep free, and puts the report there.

  2. 2

    Your week changes, and the plan follows. A meeting gets booked over that time. The report moves by itself to other free hours that still come before Friday. You don't reschedule anything.

  3. 3

    You find out early when it won't fit. If the week fills up and there's no longer room for everything before its deadline, the least important task comes off the calendar and waits in a queue. You see that days ahead, not on Friday night.

Why I built it

Growing up, “have a planner” was the one suggestion I always heard. However, planners never worked for me, as I found it hard to decide what I would do the next week. What if something comes up? What if I don't feel like it? It was even more painful when I couldn't follow my plan, as then I not only had to plan my next week, but also find slots for the things I couldn't do before. These reasons pushed me away from having a planner, but I also understand the value of one. Thus, I wanted to build a planner that works for me, and hopefully for others as well. I built it around the idea that it should be the scheduler that handles the thinking, not me. I should just provide my fixed schedule and the tasks I have, and it should build the most optimal schedule around my preferences.