The Time Boxing
A local-first planner for turning a messy day into brain dump, priorities, and time boxes.
Open project
The Time Boxing is a small productivity app built around one simple shape: collect everything, pick the top priorities, and put the day into actual time boxes.
Most planning tools make it easy to keep adding more lists. That is useful for capture, but it does not force a real plan. The Time Boxing is more opinionated. It gives you a brain dump, three top priorities, and a 30-minute schedule. The point is not to manage an infinite task database. The point is to decide what today can actually hold.
What It Does
The main screen has three working surfaces.
The brain dump is for capture. You can throw tasks there without deciding where they belong yet. The priority area keeps the top of the day small. The schedule turns those priorities into time blocks, with drag-and-drop movement and inline editing instead of modal forms.
The app also supports resizing scheduled tasks, keyboard navigation, local saving, and plan-based cloud sync. Anonymous use stays local in the browser. Pro adds Supabase-backed task sync, history, rollover, and planning across devices.
Why I Built It This Way
The product is intentionally direct. Click a slot, type. Drag a task, move it. Resize a scheduled block if it needs more time.
That sounds obvious, but it matters. A planner is not useful if the interface becomes another job. The interaction model has to stay close to how the day feels when you are actually using it: capture quickly, choose a few things, move blocks around when reality changes.
The local-first model also matters. A planner should not require an account before it is useful. The account and billing system exist for sync and history, not for basic planning.
The Engineering Shape
The app is built with Next.js, React, TypeScript, Tailwind, Zustand, Supabase, Stripe, and @dnd-kit.
The complicated part is not rendering a schedule grid. The hard part is keeping many small interactions coherent: inline editing, drag insertion, priority overflow, extended time slots, local storage, cloud sync, rollover, auth state, and billing state all have to agree about what the day means.
The core product tension is also technical: keep the interface simple, while the state model handles enough edge cases that users do not lose work.
Current State
The Time Boxing is live at thetimeboxing.com. The current version supports local planning, accounts, Pro sync, billing, history, and automatic rollover.
It is still a product I would describe as practical software rather than a polished productivity brand. That is fine. The useful part is already clear: one page where loose tasks become an actual day.