A practical setup for 4 hours of real deep work a day.
Set up Hioii for Cal Newport-style deep work: 90-minute blocks, ritual transitions and shutdown completion.
This page covers how to use hioii for deep work in practice: what to do first, how to turn it into real blocks in your calendar, and how to keep the plan alive when the day changes. Everything below is how we use Hioii ourselves — capture in Brain Dump, choose three outcomes, and box them into 30-minute slots with buffers.
Use Time Box to lock 9-11am (or your peak) as one merged 2-hour focus session. Sync to Calendar so teammates see "Focus" and stop booking you.
Before each block, do a 2-minute ritual: water, deep breath, close email. Hioii's breath cue feature can prompt this automatically. The ritual signals your brain "deep mode on."
One task per block. If a new urgent thing appears, capture it in Brain Dump (one tap) and continue. Mentor flags context switches as a pattern over time.
Newport's "shutdown ritual": mark today's blocks done, move undone to tomorrow, set tomorrow's 3 Triad tasks. Closing the loop frees your mind for genuine rest.
Start in Brain Dump and empty your head — tasks, ideas, worries — without sorting them. Then mark the three that define a successful day and drag them onto the Time Box grid, where each block is 30 minutes and every block carries a buffer. When something breaks (and it will), Auto-Organize re-plans the rest of the day instead of leaving you with a stale schedule about how to use hioii for deep work.
Teams do the same thing in Squad: a shared backlog, delegation with clear owners, and availability that shows busy or blocked slots without exposing the private content of anyone's calendar. Managers see delivery speed and a traffic-light view of what is on track — measurement without surveillance.
Hioii is free to start on the Basic plan, which includes monthly AI credits. Paid plans add more credits, longer history retention, Take Off data export and team features such as seats, shared projects and agent access through MCP.
Most people start at 2 hours and build up. Hioii's insights show your actual capacity so you stop fighting it.
Schedule them as Time Box blocks (e.g. 11am and 4pm). Outside those blocks, they should be closed.
No. Focus Mode includes ambient sound (rain, white noise) which actually helps focus for many people.