Overlap Avoidance

Overlap avoidance is Align's smart feature that automatically organizes your schedule to prevent time blocks from conflicting with each other. Think of it as your personal scheduling assistant that keeps everything neatly arranged and conflict-free.

What Is Overlap Avoidance?

Overlap avoidance automatically shifts time blocks when they would otherwise occupy the same time slot. When you're moving tasks around or adjusting their duration, Align intelligently reorganizes your schedule to ensure nothing overlaps—unless you want it to.

It's like having puzzle pieces that automatically snap into place. When you move one piece, the others adjust to make room.

How Overlap Avoidance Works

When It's Enabled (Default)

With overlap avoidance turned on, Align actively prevents scheduling conflicts:

Automatic shifting: When you resize a time block or drag it to a new position, any conflicting time blocks automatically shift to make room.

Cascading adjustments: If shifting one block causes it to overlap with another, that block shifts too. This creates a smooth cascade effect that reorganizes your entire schedule as needed.

Duration preservation: When blocks shift, they keep their original duration. A 30-minute task stays 30 minutes, just at a different time.

Smart grouping: The only time blocks are allowed to overlap is when they were already overlapping before your change, or when a locked time block prevents further shifting.

When It's Disabled

When you turn off overlap avoidance, you have complete freedom to arrange your schedule:

Manual control: Time blocks stay exactly where you put them, even if they overlap with other tasks.

Visual grouping: Overlapping blocks are grouped together visually so you can still see where conflicts exist.

Flexible planning: Perfect for showing concurrent tasks, tentative schedules, or when you want to experiment with different arrangements.

Why Use Overlap Avoidance?

Save time: No more manually adjusting every affected time block when you make a change. Align handles the reorganization for you.

Prevent conflicts: Automatically catch scheduling mistakes before they happen. You can't accidentally double-book yourself.

Maintain clean schedules: Your timeline stays organized and easy to read, with each task having its own dedicated time slot.

Reduce mental load: Focus on what matters—deciding what to do and when—instead of the mechanics of keeping your schedule conflict-free.

When to Disable Overlap Avoidance

While overlap avoidance is helpful most of the time, there are situations where you might want to turn it off:

Concurrent tasks: When you're genuinely doing multiple things at once—like listening to a podcast while exercising, or being on call during your regular work.

Tentative planning: When you're exploring different schedule options and want to see what various arrangements might look like.

Flexible priorities: When you have tasks that could happen at similar times and you want to see them together to decide later.

Complex schedules: When you're planning around many constraints and need to manually position everything before finalizing.

How It Works with Resizing

When you're resizing time blocks, overlap avoidance determines what happens to neighboring blocks:

Extending a block: If you make a time block longer and overlap avoidance is on, any conflicting blocks automatically shift to make room.

Example: You have "Morning Workout" from 8:00-9:00 and "Team Standup" from 9:00-9:30. If you extend your workout to 9:15, your standup automatically shifts to 9:15-9:45.

Shrinking a block: When you make a block shorter, other blocks don't automatically move to fill the gap. They stay where they are, creating free time in your schedule.

Cascading shifts: When one block shifts and would overlap with another, that block shifts too, creating a chain reaction that keeps your entire schedule organized.

Example: You have four consecutive 1-hour blocks from 8:00 AM to 12:00 PM. If you extend the first block by 30 minutes, all three subsequent blocks shift forward by 30 minutes.

How It Works with Locked Time Blocks

Locked time blocks have special behavior with overlap avoidance:

Locked blocks never move: Even with overlap avoidance enabled, locked blocks stay exactly where they are. They're your immovable anchors.

Shifts stop at locked blocks: When a time block needs to shift but encounters a locked block, it stops there and creates an overlap rather than moving the locked block.

Example: You have a locked "Client Call" at 2:00 PM and "Research" at 1:00 PM. If you extend an earlier task that would push Research later, it stops at 2:00 PM (creating an overlap) instead of moving your locked client call.

This ensures your most important commitments—meetings, classes, appointments—never get accidentally rescheduled when you're organizing the rest of your day.

Changing the Overlap Avoidance Setting

You can toggle overlap avoidance on or off at any time:

1. Open Settings
2. Find Overlap Avoidance
3. Toggle the setting on or off

The change applies immediately to all future actions. Any existing overlaps in your schedule remain as they are—the setting only affects new changes you make.

Quick Toggle Tip

Some users like to temporarily disable overlap avoidance when making major schedule changes, then re-enable it once everything is roughly in place. This gives you flexibility during planning while maintaining automatic organization during day-to-day use.

Best Practices

Keep it on for daily use: For most people, keeping overlap avoidance enabled makes schedule management faster and less error-prone.

Turn it off for planning sessions: When you're doing a major schedule overhaul or planning a complex week, temporarily disabling it gives you more freedom to experiment.

Combine with locking: Lock your critical appointments before disabling overlap avoidance. This protects your most important time blocks even when automatic shifting is off.

Review before disabling: Before turning off overlap avoidance, take a moment to ensure your important time blocks are locked. This prevents them from being accidentally moved.

Use visual grouping: When overlap avoidance is off, use Align's color coding and grouping to quickly identify which tasks overlap and whether that's intentional.

Understanding Visual Groups

Whether overlap avoidance is on or off, Align visually groups overlapping time blocks together:

Stacked display: Overlapping blocks appear stacked or side-by-side in your timeline, making it obvious where conflicts exist.

Quick identification: This visual grouping helps you spot scheduling conflicts at a glance, even when they're intentional.

Easy resolution: Tap any grouped blocks to see their details and decide how to resolve the overlap.

Common Questions

Does overlap avoidance work with all-day events?
Overlap avoidance primarily affects timed events. All-day events are displayed separately at the top of your timeline and don't trigger automatic shifting.

What happens to my existing overlaps if I turn on overlap avoidance?
Existing overlaps stay as they are. Overlap avoidance only affects new changes you make going forward. To resolve existing overlaps, you'll need to manually adjust them.

Can I have overlap avoidance on for some calendars but not others?
No, overlap avoidance is a global setting that applies to all time blocks. However, you can lock specific time blocks to control which ones can and can't be shifted.

Does overlap avoidance work with calendar events from other apps?
Yes! As long as the calendar allows Align to make modifications, overlap avoidance works with any time block in your timeline.

Will turning off overlap avoidance affect my notifications?
No, overlap avoidance only affects how time blocks are positioned in your schedule. It doesn't change when or how you receive notifications for your tasks.

Need More Help?

If you have questions about overlap avoidance or any other Align features, feel free to contact us. We're here to help you master your schedule.