Which agendas count¶

Connecting an account is the easy part. The decision that changes everything is what each agenda inside it is allowed to do. Get this right and the planner is accurate. Get it wrong and it either books work over your meetings, or thinks you have no time at all.

Blocking your time, and eating your capacity¶

Two different things happen when Empi looks at one of your events, and it helps to keep them apart.

Blocking means Empi will not schedule work over it. The time is taken.

Counting means the event eats your capacity: it is work, so the focus time your day has left shrinks by that much. (Capacity and load are explained in core concepts.)

Some events do both. A one-hour team meeting blocks the slot and burns an hour of your working day. Some events only block. Lunch, the dentist, picking up the kids: you are unavailable, so nothing may be booked there, but none of it is work, so it should not be subtracted from the work you can still get done.

If everything on your calendar counted as work, a day with a long lunch and a personal appointment would look completely full while you actually had a good afternoon of focus left in it.

Agenda modes¶

Each agenda has a Mode, set in Settings > Integrations: open the account, open the agenda.

Use Scheduling for the calendars that describe where your day actually goes: your work calendar, your shared family calendar. Use View only for a calendar you want to see but that should never hold the planner back, like a colleague's agenda or a public holidays feed. Use Off for the ones you do not want to look at.

Scheduling needs at least one time slot assigned to it: Empi asks you to "Pick at least one slot to activate this calendar", so it knows which part of your week that agenda's events belong to. The same grouping lets you filter the agenda in and out of the calendar rail.

Event types¶

Whether an event counts toward your load is set by its type. Types live in Settings > Events, under Calendar event types.

Each type has a Counts as value:

• Meeting and Focus count toward busy time. They eat your capacity.
• None is ignored, for example a personal block. The time is still held, and the planner will not schedule over it, but it is not work.

Meal is built in and defaults to None, which is the behaviour you want: your lunch break holds the slot without pretending to be an hour of work. You can create your own types with + Add type (Sport, School run, whatever your week is made of) and choose what each counts as.

Empi categorises events for you: an event that looks like a meal resolves to the Meal type on its own, with no action from you. If it guesses wrong, open the event and change its Type in the meeting details panel. Your choice always wins over the guess.

Meeting details¶

Click any event in the calendar to open Meeting details. It shows the event's Type (which you can change here), its Location with an Open in Google Maps link, and its Notes.

If the event carries a conference link, the panel offers a button to launch it directly: Join via Zoom, Join via Microsoft Teams, Join via Google Meet, or Open meeting link for anything else. The same Join button appears in the NOW / NEXT strip at the top of the app when the meeting is about to start, so you never dig through an invite to find the link.

Next: commute and travel time, which turns an event with an address into real, blocked travel time.