Tasks

Tasks

A task is a chunk of work skulid auto-places onto a target calendar in the next available Working-hours slot.

Anatomy

Field	Meaning
Title	Free-form. Becomes the event summary.
Notes	Goes into the event description.
Target calendar	Where the scheduler writes the block.
Priority	critical / high / medium / low. Drives Priorities Kanban.
Duration	Minutes the scheduler reserves.
Due	Optional deadline. The scheduler won't place after due.
Category	Optional pin; when blank the auto-categorizer decides.
Status	pending (not placed) / scheduled / completed / cancelled

How placement works

When you save a task, the scheduler asynchronously:

1. Loads the target account's effective Working hours.
2. Expands those hours over [now, due_at or now+14d).
3. Pulls freebusy for every enabled calendar on every connected account — not just the target. It is one person's time regardless of which account owns the calendar, so a personal task will not be placed on top of a work meeting. skulid's own writes — smart blocks, decompression buffers, other scheduled tasks and habits — are then subtracted, so a Focus block never stops real work being scheduled. That costs no extra Google calls: skulid recorded each of those windows when it wrote them.
4. Applies any configured buffer padding.
5. Calls hours.ChunkedSlots to plan where the duration goes: one contiguous block if there is room for one, otherwise several (see below).
6. Inserts (or updates, on reschedule) a Google event per block, with extendedProperties.private.skulidManaged="1" plus skulidTaskId=<id> so the rule engine doesn't loop on them.

If nothing can be placed, the task stays pending and says why — the reason appears under its status on the tasks list, e.g. "Only 6h of the 8h needed would fit" or "No free time before Fri May 1, 5:00 PM".

Splitting a long task

A task longer than any single free gap is split across several blocks rather than left unplaced. "8 hours of writing, due Friday" lands in whatever gaps exist between now and Friday.

The rules:

• One block wins whenever it can. If the whole duration fits in a single free window, that is what you get — an ordinary task looks and behaves exactly as it always did, with no churn.
• Pieces are at least the minimum task block, set on Settings → Buffers and defaulting to 30 minutes. Gaps shorter than that are skipped rather than filled, so an eight-hour task doesn't shatter into a dozen fragments wedged between meetings. Raise it if you want fewer, longer sittings.
• The last piece may be short. A 15-minute tail beats leaving the whole task unplaced over it.
• At most 8 blocks, as a backstop against a pathological calendar.
• Placement is all-or-nothing. If the whole duration can't be covered, nothing is booked — booking 6 of 8 hours and calling the task scheduled would be a lie you only discover on Friday. The note says how close it got.
• Split blocks are titled Write the report (1/3), (2/3), (3/3), so they read as one task rather than three duplicates. A single-block task keeps its plain title.

Each block is a row in task_chunk. The task's own scheduled_starts_at / scheduled_ends_at summarise the first block, which is what the tasks list, the planner and the AI assistant show; the tasks list adds "(first of N blocks)" when there is more than one.

Re-placement reconciles rather than rebuilds: blocks are moved in place where the counts line up, extras are deleted and shortfalls inserted, so the churn on your calendar is limited to the blocks that actually moved. Deleting a task deletes all of its blocks.

Manual scheduling

The Schedule button on a task row triggers an immediate placement. Done marks the task completed and leaves the existing event in place (it really happened — the calendar should still show it). Delete removes the task and every block it holds.

Audit log

Every placement / reschedule / drop lands in the audit log with kind="task" and the task's scheduled window in the message field.

Limitations

• Blocks are re-planned wholesale, not pinned. Every placement pass re-derives the whole set from current availability, so a block can move when the calendar around it changes. Reconciliation keeps that down to the blocks that genuinely have to move, but skulid does not promise a block stays put once you have seen it.
• Placement fails closed. If any connected account's freebusy can't be fetched — a revoked token, an API error — the task isn't placed at all rather than placed against a busy set known to be incomplete. Scheduling over a real meeting because a token expired is worse than not scheduling. A locked-out account shows a banner on every page, so the cause is visible; reconnect it and placement resumes on the next tick.
• A real meeting created on top of a skulid block isn't seen. Google merges overlapping busy periods before returning them, and skulid removes its own blocks from that set by matching the windows it recorded. So if a meeting was created over a Focus block after the block was placed, that overlap stops reading as busy. Narrow, and the smart-block recompute usually moves the block out of the way first.
• No drag-and-drop yet. Move a task by editing its target calendar/due, or use the AI assistant.

See also

• Priorities — Kanban view of active tasks
• Hours — Working/Personal/Meeting windows
• Buffers — padding around scheduled blocks
• AI Assistant — create_task, update_task, complete_task, delete_task