What are working hours?

Any tool that places tasks on a calendar needs to know when it is allowed to. Without a boundary, an auto-scheduler will happily fill Saturday morning or push a task to eleven at night, and the plan it produces will be technically valid and practically useless. Working hours are that boundary. They turn free time from a calendar gap into a gap you are actually willing to work in.

They also matter for people, not just software. A defined end to the workday is the difference between finishing and drifting, and a defined start protects the morning for deep work before meetings accumulate. Remote teams and freelancers in particular benefit from an explicit schedule, because no office is enforcing one for them.

Finally, working hours make capacity visible. If you have thirty hours of estimated tasks and twenty-five hours of working time minus meetings, no amount of prioritization will fit everything in. Seeing that early is what lets you renegotiate deadlines instead of missing them.

• Start from your real pattern, not the ideal one. If you never do focused work before ten, do not set nine. The schedule should describe when you actually work.
• Set them per weekday. Fridays are often shorter, and some people keep one day meeting-free. A single 9-to-5 rarely fits every day.
• Leave breaks inside the window. Lunch and short breaks between sessions are part of a sustainable day. Tools that pack tasks back-to-back produce plans you will not follow.
• Reserve your best hours. Know your chronotype and keep the peak block free of meetings so the scheduler has somewhere to put demanding tasks.
• Account for meetings honestly. Working hours minus meetings is your capacity. If that number is small, the fix is fewer meetings, not longer hours.
• Treat the boundary as real. Tasks that do not fit inside working hours get moved to another day, not into the evening.
• Revisit each quarter. Life changes; the schedule should change with it.

Working hours in Fluidwave exist to drive AI scheduling. When you ask the app to plan your tasks, it looks at your Google Calendar events, finds free time inside your working hours, keeps breaks before and after events, and places tasks as work sessions in that space. Nothing lands outside the window unless you drag it there yourself.

Scheduling runs in two modes. Auto-prioritization mode packs the visible tasks into free time in their prioritized order and is instant. AI mode asks Claude to weigh task names and context when deciding order and how to split long tasks into several sessions, which is slower per run. Either way, proposed sessions render dashed until you confirm them one at a time or all at once.

Calendar sync is deliberately narrow. Fluidwave reads your events only to find free time, and the only events it ever writes back are the sessions you choose to sync.

Working hours pair naturally with Schedules, which assign tasks to specific times for focused execution, and with the Active filter, which hides tasks outside their schedule. Together they mean the list you see and the calendar you follow agree with each other. See auto-scheduling for the full flow.