Set Daily Intentions Using Rise Calendar Blocks

Table of Contents

Understanding what Rise calendar blocks actually do

When I first opened Rise, I’ll be honest, I expected it to feel like another “pretty wrapper” app where the calendar looks different but everything under the hood is just the same as Google Calendar. It’s not. Rise has this block system where instead of throwing events everywhere randomly, you slot work or habits into actual time chunks — which sounds normal until you realize you can force certain blocks to move together like a unit. So if you shift your “morning focus” block by thirty minutes, the entire set of attached tasks comes with it.

If you’ve only ever dropped to-dos straight into Google Calendar, the blocks feel weird at first. There’s this slight resistance — like you’re setting intentions for the day versus just logging appointments. And yes, that matters because if you only track deadlines, you forget how you actually *want* the day to go. I learned this the hard way when I kept ending every day thinking, “Oh right, I wanted to go for a walk at lunch” while still glued to my desk.

One hitch: when I first moved over, my Google sync mysteriously skipped two events. They sat in my Google calendar but never appeared in Rise, and there was no obvious pattern why. I had to manually recreate them inside a new block, which was annoying but actually helped me see how the block system bundles things differently than plain events.

Setting up base time blocks before the day begins

If you start dropping blocks in the middle of the day, you’ll chase them forever. The trick I found is to open Rise when I’m still in bed and create the skeleton of the day before I touch email or messages. This way, those last-minute “urgent” things can be fit *into* a block instead of replacing one entirely.

I create maybe three to four large blocks at first — something like:

These are flexible. They aren’t “meetings,” they’re placeholders for focus zones. When a call request pops up, I’ll see if it fits inside the Calls block, and if not, I slide that whole block forward or backward.

I once tested starting this setup at noon after several chaotic mornings, and the contrast was ridiculous. Without the early skeleton, my afternoon blocks ended up being two hours shorter because I couldn’t stop rearranging.

How to actually assign intentions inside each block

You don’t just name a block “Deep Work” and then decide later. That defeats its purpose. When I open the block, I write in a sentence like “Finish draft for client, no tabs except Docs.” This is your intention. If you leave it vague, you’ve basically just made a fancier to-do list.

In Rise, you can also attach small sub-tasks inside the block. These don’t act like standalone events — they nest under the main label. Imagine you have “Creative Projects” set for 11am to 1pm. Under it I might add:
– Storyboard video concept
– Choose music track
– Export draft for feedback

The cool part is if I suddenly get an extra thirty minutes, I can click and extend just that block without having to move each sub-task individually. The opposite is true too: if lunch starts early, I drag the block shorter and the lowest-priority sub-task drops automatically.

Preventing calendar chaos when things shift mid day

Here’s what always trips people: something urgent lands at 10:30 and blows up the morning block. The rookie move is to shove everything to “later” without thinking about ripple effects. With Rise, I’ve started dragging affected blocks together like puzzle pieces, so they slide as one cluster instead of scattering.

One rainy Tuesday, my contractor called for a 45-minute call right in the middle of my Deep Work block. I grabbed the *whole* Deep Work + break + Admin block and slid them down. This sounds obvious, but in Google Calendar those aren’t bound together — so you’d have to move them one by one and inevitably forget a five-minute gap somewhere. That gap is where wasted time hides.

There’s also the nuclear option: right-click the block and mark it “Unscheduled,” which dumps it into a holding area on the side. I had to do that on a day where nothing went as planned, and oddly it felt better than deleting tasks because I knew they’d be rescheduled, not lost.

Using color codes to visually protect your energy

You wouldn’t think colors matter until you try scrolling Rise at 3pm and can’t remember which blocks are the high energy ones. I color my heavy thinking work in deep blue, admin in grey, meetings in orange, and personal care in green. That way I can instantly see if my day is about to wall me into back-to-back intense work without a break.

Pro tip: never color everything. I tried making a rainbow for fun once and it backfired because my brain thought every single block was equally urgent. Flat colors = calm focus.

Also, Rise lets you change a block’s color even after it’s started. So if I’m halfway through a block and realize it’s more admin than creative, I’ll recolor it grey to match my mental energy instead of pretending I’m still in “deep work mode.” Small but actually very relieving.

Dealing with sync hiccups and invisible events

This is where the trust-but-verify mindset comes in. Sometimes, Rise and Google Calendar get along perfectly — other times, a meeting will appear in one and ghost you in the other. I’ve found running a quick refresh (that weird rotating arrows icon in the top right) before locking in my daily blocks prevents sudden overwriting.

Once, I noticed a “Lunch with Sam” in Google but Rise didn’t see it at all. When I manually added it to Rise, fifteen minutes later the sync pulled it in as a duplicate but with the wrong time. I ended up deleting both and re-creating it just to get peace of mind. Not elegant, but it worked.

I keep a mental list of “check events” each morning — usually meetings with other humans — and compare them across both calendars. It’s old-school manual checking, but until I trust the system 100% I’ll keep doing it.

Making intention review a habit

Setting blocks is half the work. The other half is actually looking at them during the day and asking if I’m on track. I put a tiny recurring block at 12:30 labeled “check if I’m off track.” It’s five minutes long, but anchoring it in the middle of the day means I’ll catch drift before it’s too late.

Some days that check just confirms I’m fine — other days it leads to a total reshuffle. Either way, it’s better than reaching 5pm and realizing I forgot the one thing I actually wanted to finish 😛

The best part of Rise is when this checking habit becomes second nature. Eventually, I don’t fight the rearranging because I know I’m still moving toward what I intended — even if that looks nothing like the plan I made in bed that morning.

Linking Rise with other intention tracking tools

If you’re already a Notion or Todoist person, you can use Rise just for the time visual and keep the task database elsewhere. I sometimes dump my block names into Notion at the end of the week just to see where my time really went versus where I thought it would go. It’s humbling, in the most frustrating way 🙂

Rise works fine standalone, but for long-term habit tracking it’s easier to pair it with something that can do graphs and timelines. I’ve sent friends to todoist.com before because its project filter system makes it easy to match against the block names you use.

One thing I avoid is full automation between Rise and task managers — every time I tried syncing tasks automatically, I’d end up with either duplicated entries or blocks filling with half-completed junk pulled over from last week. Manual review before import keeps my daily blocks intentional instead of just reactive.