Drop everything and download: Hour Blocks Day Planner
Block party. (Or meeting. Or project. Or shopping trip. Or…)
You might think you’re organised because you use a calendar. Then, before you know it, the thing’s covered in overlapping appointments, your schedule looking more like modern art than coherence.
Hour Blocks rethinks digital calendars. It forces you to focus on what’s truly important, rather than crowding your day with cruft. How? The clue’s in the name.
What does it do?
Launch the app and it presents every hour of the day as a slot you can fill – but only with a single event. Add something the app recognises – dinner; gym – and it’ll even add a little icon. Nice.
You can drag the blocks around, and load events from existing iOS calendars. What you can’t do is add more than one thing to any given hour.
The point is instead of trying to do 27 tasks at once, you give all of your attention to what’s important. In hourly chunks, for some reason. (To be fair, it works when you get into the swing of things.)
Any downsides?
It’s rather… basic. Don’t get us wrong – basic is part of the point with this app. It just goes a bit too far. For example, we’d like to turn off night time hours, because there’s no reason to end up gawping at empty slots from midnight through to 7am – we know what we’re doing during that period. (That’s when we’re Batman, obv.)
Still, the creator’s released two updates over the past few weeks, so here’s hoping Hour Blocks gains a few more features while keeping its razor-sharp focus on organising your day.
Where can I get it?
Hour Blocks is available for iOS, and is currently free from the App Store. It’s compatible with iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch.
Craig Grannell
Contributor 
