The Hourglass

A weekly time-blocking tool for planning your typical week in 30-minute blocks, with an AI collaboration built in.

The Hourglass — a 7-day grid with color-coded time blocks
Open The Hourglass Get the planning prompt

What it is

The Hourglass is a 7-day grid, Monday through Sunday, spanning 6:00am to 9:00pm in 30-minute blocks. You drag on empty cells to create a block, drag blocks to move them, and dragging a block onto occupied time cascades the existing blocks later in the day. It's designed to plan a typical week (the repeating shape you want to live in), rather than any specific calendar range.

Everything runs in your browser. Your data lives in local storage, not on a server, so no sign-in and nothing is sent anywhere. You can export your week as JSON and re-import it whenever you want.

The AI part

The interesting piece isn't the grid. It's how you fill it. Instead of hand-building a week from scratch, you use a prompt that turns any AI assistant (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, whichever you prefer) into a planning partner. It asks you seven questions about your work, movement, meetings, and habits, drafts a week back to you in prose, and hands you a JSON file to paste directly into the tool.

How to use it

  1. Get the planning prompt and paste it into your preferred AI assistant.
  2. Answer its questions. Adjust the draft it proposes until it fits.
  3. Copy the JSON it produces at the end. In The Hourglass, open the Import panel and paste it in.

Built with Flask, ported to a client-side static app. Source on GitHub.