By Slaven — Dec 31, 2025

The Planner

Zoom out from a single day to a week, a month, or the whole year: drag tasks across dates and paint runs of days with color highlights.

The Daily tab is one page at a time. The Planner tab is the wide view: the same tasks, reminders, and events spread across a week, a month, or a whole year, so you can plan past today without losing the shape of it. Think of it as the fold-out spread at the back of a paper planner.

The yearly Planner with September and October painted in overlapping color Highlights

The Planner is one of the tabs you can show or hide in Customize, alongside Daily, Timeline, Lists, and the rest.

Three ways to zoom

The header carries a menu with Weekly, Monthly, and Yearly. Pick one to change how far you're standing back; a checkmark marks the mode you're in, and switching snaps you to the current week, month, or year. Weekly and Monthly also offer Filter Lists in that same menu, to narrow the grid to just the lists you're planning around.

Weekly

Weeks run across the screen, one column each, and you scroll sideways to reach the ones ahead or behind. Each column stacks its seven days down the page, and every day shows what's on it: calendar events, reminders, timed and untimed tasks, and the habits you're keeping (an everyday habit stays out of the way to keep the column readable).

Tap a day's heading to open that date in the Daily tab.
Tap the blank line at the foot of a day to add a task there, already dated to that day.
Drag a task or reminder from one day onto another to move it, the quick way to shove a slipping task forward a few days.
Touch and hold a day (right-click on Mac) for a menu: a new task, jump to that date, open its journal, or toggle a highlight on the day.

Monthly

The same grid, a month to a column: a compact run of the month's days you scroll through, with the same tap-to-open, add-a-task, and drag-to-move a day cell gives you in Weekly. It's the altitude for "sometime next month" work, where the week is too close and the year too far.

Yearly: a year in highlights

Yearly lays the whole year out as a grid of days, and its job is color. A highlight is a named color you paint across days: a green "vacation", a red "deadline crunch", a blue run of travel. Painted onto the grid, the shape of your year becomes something you can see from across the room.

You start with a blank palette. Tap Add a Highlight, give it a name (optional) and a color, and it's ready. To paint, select a highlight in the bar along the bottom, then mark days:

Tap a day to color it.
Tap a week number to color the whole week, or a weekday heading to color every Monday (or any weekday) in that month.
Swipe across a row to paint a run of days in one stroke. Start the swipe on a day that already has the highlight and the stroke erases the run instead, so the same gesture paints and clears.

Select a highlight and the year narrows to it: every day carrying it fills solid, and the rest fade back, so a single color's run reads clean across the months. A day can hold more than one highlight, shown as diagonal stripes when nothing's selected. To see or clear a single day, tap it with no highlight selected: a small popover lists the day's tasks and lets you toggle its highlights or clear them all.

These day highlights color whole days on the calendar. They're separate from tags, which mark individual tasks, habits, and notes. Today's highlights also appear in the Highlights section of your Daily page, where you can toggle them for the day or add a new one without leaving the page.

Captioning a run of days

Touch and hold a day (right-click on Mac) for a menu. On this day opens the day popover described above. Highlight Caption labels a run of color: pick one of the day's highlights, type a few words, and the caption appears just below that stretch, "France" under a week of travel or "deep work" under a fortnight of blue. A small square in the highlight's color marks the caption, and when the run is longer than the text, a thin line in that color carries on to the end of the run. It covers every day the highlight reaches to the left and right of where you set it.

The caption stays anchored to the day you set it on. Unhighlight that day and the caption goes with it; unhighlight a day in the middle and the run splits, with the caption staying on the side that still holds its day. When runs overlap, their captions stack below the week.

Captions follow you to the Daily page as well: in the Highlights section, a highlight whose run carries a caption shows it under its name, so a glance at the day tells you it's day three of "France".

Highlights on your calendar

When you add a highlight, you can point it at one of your calendars under Sync to Calendar. From then on, painting that highlight onto a day writes a real all-day event there, named after the highlight, and erasing the day removes it, so a synced "vacation" shows up in every app that reads your calendar. Highlights without a calendar stay inside Finalist.

Your real events can show in the year too: with Show events in Yearly Planner on in Settings (the default), each upcoming day carries small markers in its calendars' colors, so a busy stretch stands out against the highlights.

Calendars in the grid

The Planner honors your calendar choices. Hidden calendars stay hidden here, and a calendar you've set to Show as All-Day (see Calendar & Reminders) contributes its events to the day cells the same way. To keep a calendar's all-day events out of the grid specifically, turn off All-Day in Planner for it in the Calendars configurator.

On Mac and iPad

The wider the screen, the better the Planner reads. On iPad and Mac the mode switcher and the highlight palette live in the toolbar, opening a task in its own window on the Mac, and the extra room lets a month or a year breathe. Reordering and renaming highlights gets explicit up and down controls on the Mac, where lists don't drag.