Calendar

The calendar in Zettly is a first-class surface, not a view on top of something else. It reads from the same vault as the rest of the app, so tasks scheduled in Tasks show up here, and events created here flow into the views that reference them. You plan your week in the calendar, but the work happens in the notes, boards, and tasks that the calendar is connected to.

This page covers the views, the events, the tasks integration, and the AI assistant features that make scheduling a conversation rather than a chore.

The four views

The calendar has four views, accessible from the view menu in the header.

Month

A traditional month grid. Each day is a cell; events and tasks show inside their cells. Drag an event to a different day to reschedule. Click a day to drill into the day view. Month view is good for the big picture — what’s coming up, what’s overloaded, what’s open.

Week

A seven-day grid, typically with time-of-day rows. Week view is the workhorse for most people. It shows the meetings, the focus blocks, and the scheduled tasks. Drag to reschedule; click and drag to create a new event. The week view is where most scheduling actually happens.

Day

A single day, broken out hour by hour. Day view is for the day-of — see exactly what’s happening, when, and what’s next. The day view shows a focus list of tasks for the day, drawn from the same task hub as the rest of the app.

Agenda

A chronological list of upcoming events and tasks, grouped by day. Agenda view is what you check on your phone in the morning — what’s coming up over the next two weeks, with the most urgent stuff at the top. Agenda is also the easiest view to print.

Drag to reschedule

The fastest way to move an event or a task is to drag it. Drop it on a new time slot in week or day view, or on a new day in month or agenda view. The change saves immediately and flows back to the source — for tasks, the due date in the note updates; for events, the event file in your vault updates.

A few things worth knowing:

• Snap to slot. The calendar snaps to fifteen-minute increments by default. The snap interval is configurable.
• Resize to change duration. Grab the bottom edge of an event and drag to change how long it is.
• Multi-day events. Drag an event across day boundaries to make it span multiple days. The event still shows as one entry in the agenda view.
• Copy with option-drag. Hold the option/alt key while dragging to duplicate an event to a new time. Useful for recurring meetings that move by a few minutes.

Standard calendar import

If you already have a calendar somewhere — Google Calendar, iCloud, a CalDAV server, an .ics file — you can bring it into Zettly. The app supports standard calendar protocols, so any provider that speaks CalDAV works, and .ics files can be imported directly.

A few notes on the import:

• One-way or two-way sync. You can choose. One-way sync brings external events into Zettly but doesn’t write back. Two-way sync keeps both sides in step. Two-way sync requires provider support.
• Multiple calendars. Bring in as many as you want. Each imported calendar shows as a separate color in the views, and you can toggle them on and off.
• Recurring events. Standard RRULE-based recurrence is preserved. The app doesn’t try to invent its own recurrence model.
• Attendees and metadata. Imported events keep their original metadata, including attendees, locations, and notes. The calendar view shows the most relevant fields.

For most people, the simplest path is to import a personal .ics file and keep Zettly’s calendar as the place where tasks meet events. The two systems can coexist.

Busy time blocking

A busy block is a calendar event with no other content — it just reserves a slot. It’s the way to mark “I’m heads-down from 2pm to 4pm” without committing to a specific activity.

The calendar supports busy blocks in two flavors:

• Free-form. A plain event with a title like “Focus” or “Heads down.” Use it for personal blocking.
• From a task. Pick a task from the Tasks hub, schedule it on the calendar, and it shows as a busy block. The block is “linked” to the task — open the block and you can see which task it represents and jump to the source note.

Busy blocks are visible in week and day views, and they’re counted toward a “busy-ness” indicator that warns you when a day is overloaded. The indicator is a small colored bar in the day cell; the color depends on how full the day is.

Tasks on the calendar

The Tasks hub and the calendar are tightly coupled. Any task with a due date shows up on the calendar automatically — on the due date, in the agenda view, and in the day view’s focus list.

A few practical things:

• A scheduled task is a busy block. Once a task has a time (not just a date), it shows in the time grid.
• Drag a task to schedule it. Drag a task from the day view’s focus list to a time slot. The task gets a scheduled time, which shows up in the task hub.
• A task with a due date is a deadline. If you give a task a due date but no time, it shows on the calendar as an all-day entry. That’s the convention for “this is when it’s due” without committing to a specific hour.

The point is that there’s only one task. The task hub shows it as a row; the calendar shows it as a time slot. Edit it in either place and both update.

AI scheduling

The AI assistant can schedule tasks for you. This is one of the most useful day-to-day features of the calendar.

A typical flow:

1. Open the AI assistant and say something like “schedule the launch tasks for next week.”
2. The AI looks at the tasks in the launch project, your existing calendar (meetings, busy blocks, focus time), and your working hours.
3. The AI proposes a schedule — a set of slots for each task, with explanations for why each slot was chosen.
4. You review the proposed schedule. The AI shows a preview of the calendar with the tasks in their proposed slots.
5. You accept the schedule. The tasks get their times, the calendar shows them, and the notes get the updated task lines.

A few things this is good for:

• Backlogs. A long list of unscheduled tasks becomes a week that makes sense, with the urgent things first and the harder things during your high-focus hours.
• Re-planning. “Re-plan my week, I have a deadline on Friday” — the AI looks at the new constraint and proposes a new layout.
• Gap-filling. “Find me an hour for deep work tomorrow” — the AI scans tomorrow for a free hour, suggests a slot, and schedules a placeholder task for it.

The AI never reschedules a meeting or a fixed event without your approval. The proposals are tasks and busy blocks only. See AI assistant for the full model, including how to undo anything the AI does.

Density settings

The calendar’s visual density is configurable. Three presets:

• Compact. Small fonts, tight spacing. Shows more on screen at once. Good for the month view and for laptops with limited screen real estate.
• Normal. Default. Balanced.
• Comfortable. Larger fonts, more whitespace. Easier on the eyes for long planning sessions.

The density is a per-surface setting. You can have the month view in compact and the week view in comfortable, for example.

Tips and conventions

A few things that aren’t obvious until you’ve used the calendar for a while:

• Time-block your work. A task scheduled in the calendar is more likely to happen than a task on a list. The block is a commitment, not a hope.
• Keep the day view short. A day with twenty events is a day that goes wrong. The calendar’s overload warning is there for a reason.
• The agenda is a planning tool. When you have a planning block on your calendar, switch to agenda view. The list of what’s coming up is easier to reason about than a grid.
• The week view is the workhorse. Most planning happens in week view. Month is for the big picture, agenda is for the list, day is for the day-of. Week is where you do the work.

See Tasks for the source of the tasks the calendar shows, and AI assistant for the AI scheduling features.