To set yourself up for having successful days. Benjamin Franklin once said, “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.”

Benjamin Franklin famously used time blocking to account for all the time he spent in his day, from work to sleeping, meals and personal time.

Successful people succeed because they take the time to make plans. Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Charlie Munger, Cal Newport, Jack Dorsey, Marc Andreessen and many others create daily schedules that allow them to effectively manage their time and improve their productivity.

A structured daily planner app is a digital planner that helps you plan out your day by converting your to-do lists into a daily schedule using a structured process.

While many apps allow you to combine your calendar events with your daily tasks and to-do lists, most online planners use a freeform approach that leads to less effective daily plans.

A structured planning process enforces consistency in your planning and ensures you create higher quality daily plans on a daily basis.

Day Optimizer guides you through a 3-step planning process that has been designed to create more realistic daily schedules by reducing the mental load of going through the planning process and minimizing psychological tendencies that cause us to plan poorly.

Day Optimizer leverages 3 key principles to help you structure your day:

Maintain the same thinking mode
Deciding what to work on, how long to work on it and when to schedule it requires three different ways of thinking.

When you are using a freeform tool, you are constantly switching between these different modes, losing valuable context that helps you make better decisions.

Using the 3-step process, Day Optimizer ensures you stay in the brainstorming mode until you have figured out what you want to work on today (the Commit step), then keeps you in the analytical mode while you allocate time to each commitment (the Allocate step), and only when both those are done, switches you into scheduling mode (the Schedule step). 

Allocate before scheduling
When you look at your schedule, then decide how long you’ll work on a task, you set yourself up for creating an unrealistic schedule.

Most of us want to accomplish as much in our days as we can. At the beginning of the planning process, our schedule is wide open and we allocate our time freely. But as we see our time start to shrink, either consciously or unconsciously, we start underestimating how long things will take to squeeze more into our day.

By going through a structured planning process that forces us to choose our time allocations based on how much time we truly think a task needs, we’re able to create more realistic schedules once we get to the scheduling step.

Allocating before scheduling doesn’t mean we don’t get to change our allocations in the scheduling step, just that we’re biased towards more realistic time allocations, helping us be more realistic when we plan out our day. 

Schedule longest durations first
When planning your day, if you schedule short commitments first, you can quickly find yourself with not enough time for your bigger commitments.

Steven Covey used to demonstrate by putting big rocks, small rocks and sand into a jar. If you start with the sand, then the small rocks, you won’t have room for the big rocks. But if you start with the big rocks—a principle that has become known as Big Rocks First—you can fit everything in the jar. 

Day Optimizer helps you follow this principle by sorting your commitments from the longest to the shortest durations as you assign commitments to each time slot. This helps you schedule on your “big rocks” first, then fit your smaller commitments around those.  

Definitely! Day Optimizer can automatically import calendar events from Google, Apple iCloud, Outlook.com, Office 365 / Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Exchange calendars. Calendar events will appear automatically as you plan your day.

Day Optimizer can also import multiple calendars from multiple providers, in case you have one calendar provider for work and another for personal appointments.

And if you have access to other people’s calendars, you can turn these off to ignore them, or continue to sync them to provide context to your planning process without adding them into your daily schedule. 

You bet! Day Optimizer has the concept of a daily activity as separate from a task. Daily activities are perfect for tracking habits.

Every activity has a history calendar that shows you exactly on which days you did your habit, which days you committed to doing it but didn’t do it, and which days you didn’t even commit to doing it.

And if you have a daily routine you’d like to track, you can use checkbox lists to track each individual step in the routine, so you can see which steps you completed on which days.

Of course! Day Optimizer is both a time management and a task management tool. You can use Day Optimizer as a general task manager for both task capture and tagging.

Filtering options allow you to see different task views both on the Tasks screen and during the planning process.

During the planning process, special filters can automatically hide tasks that you’ve been ignoring for too long (or only show you those tasks). Using task list views like hiding inactive tasks can help you manage overwhelm and focus on relevant tasks without having to manage these manually. 

Absolutely! Time blocking is an effective way to minimize procrastination and increase focus.

As a daily task planner, Day Optimizer helps you schedule tasks into time blocks throughout your day. These blocks of time create a daily schedule—a visual timeline of your daily tasks, work and personal events, and other activities like habits, meals and daily chores that take up time in your day.

Day Optimizer has two different planning modes that help you create time blocks:

• Daily Schedule
  A daily agenda that shows exactly when you will work on every task, appointment and activity that you’ve committed to doing today. Daily schedules are the gold standard of structured day planning.
• Time Bucket
  A list of time blocks that you can drag and drop to reorder. Unlike a daily schedule, the time blocks are assigned to specific time slots in your day. Rather you work on them in the order of importance, while keeping an awareness of how much time you have allocated to each commitment.

Both planning modes can help you visually plan and execute your day using time blocking. A third planning mode called a Commitment List can provide you with a daily task overview for those days when you don’t have the time and energy to time block.

Unlike other daily planner apps that are merely visual planners, Day Optimizer has unique time and task management features that enable you to more effectively execute your day, not just plan it:

• Done Today vs Done Forever
  Make progress on your critical tasks without losing them. When you’re done working on a task for the day, mark it Done Today. It’ll reappear in your planning flow. Once the task is complete, mark it Done Forever.
• Real-Time Time Analysis
  See when you are ahead or behind schedule. As time flows and you mark items off, the amount of available time and effort are constantly being updated, so you’ll always know how much time you have left in relation to your workload—critical for adjusting your plan throughout the day!
• Planning Dashboard
  Sometimes you want to see a to-do for context, but not to have it on your schedule. The dashboard has to-do lists for both unscheduled commitments and future tasks—plus a notes section—so you’ll always have the context you need.

In addition, Day Optimizer also has checklists within commitments that can be used to create lists of subtasks, 3 different types of daily plans (Commitment List, Time Bucket, Daily Schedule) and history views so you can easily see how well you executed your days in the past.

Day Optimizer is a visual day planner that is best suited for professionals who have autonomy with how they work. By using a daily time planner, these professionals can create more realistic daily plans that allow them to work more effectively—and if they bill their time, make more money.

However, Day Optimizer can be used by a range of different people who would benefit from a structured daily planning process, including those with Attention Hyperactivity Deficit Disorder (ADHD), busy moms, and ambitious students.

Day Optimizer has a 7-day free trial. Thereafter, Day Optimizer costs $14.99 per month or $149 per year (saving $30). This includes automatic calendar imports, use on both desktop & mobile devices and a personal one-on-one onboarding.

If you lose just 20 minutes per day to distraction, procrastination or inefficient work, Day Optimizer pays for itself in 3 days or less—over the course of a month, you can easily save 20 hours of wasted time and get up to a 67x return on your investment.