Does today integrate with Linear?

Not currently. The workflow is manual: identify your highest-priority Linear issue each morning and set it as your daily outcome in today. A Linear integration that pulls issues into today is on the roadmap.

Can today replace Linear for engineering teams?

No. Today has no team features, no issue tracking, no sprint management, and no code integration. It's a personal planning tool that complements team tools like Linear.

How do I decide which Linear issue to make my daily outcome in today?

Look at your current cycle, identify the highest-priority in-progress issue, and make it the day's outcome. If multiple issues have equal priority, pick the one that benefits most from 90+ minutes of uninterrupted focused work.

Can today help with deep work for engineers?

Yes — that's one of its primary use cases. Creating explicit deep work blocks for complex engineering tasks, logging sessions with outcome linkage, and using the energy check-in to schedule cognitively demanding work in peak windows are all directly applicable to engineering deep work.

today vs Linear: the team workflow tool vs. the personal daily execution planner

today

Calm daily planner

Time blocks, focus, commitments, reflection

Linear

a project management and issue tracking tool built for software engineering teams with cycle-based planning, roadmaps, and GitHub integration

Why engineers compare Linear and today

Software engineers are common users of both tools for a specific reason: Linear manages their team work (issues, cycles, projects, code review integration), while today manages their personal day execution (when to work on which Linear issue, how to protect deep work time, how to track actual focus sessions). The comparison question is usually: 'do I need both, or does one replace the other?' The answer is almost always both — because they operate at different levels of the same work system.

What Linear does that today doesn't

Linear is a team coordination tool: it tracks software issues, manages sprint cycles, integrates with GitHub for PR and branch tracking, produces roadmaps, and coordinates work across an engineering team. None of this is possible in today, which is a personal tool with no team features. Engineers should absolutely use Linear (or its equivalents like Jira or GitHub Issues) for team-facing work management. The question is whether they need anything additional for their personal daily execution — and for many engineers, the answer is yes.

What today adds for Linear users

Linear tells a software engineer what work is assigned to them in a given cycle. Today helps them decide which of those Linear issues to work on today, protect time for the deep work those issues require, and track whether the day's focused sessions were productive. A common pattern: each morning, the engineer reviews their Linear cycle issues, picks the highest-priority one as the day's outcome in today, creates a 90-minute deep work block for it, and logs focus sessions against it. Today becomes the personal execution layer that Linear's team-facing project tracking doesn't cover.

The context switch problem between Linear and deep work

Linear is an always-open tool for many engineers — issue updates, PR comments, and cycle progress flow through it throughout the day. This creates a context switching trap: engineers working on a complex problem get pulled into Linear's notification stream, losing the focus that deep software engineering requires. Today's design encourages session-based deep work: you start a session focused on one Linear issue, mark the session as outcome-linked, and log completion. The session boundary creates a deliberate 'do not check Linear' period rather than the open-ended background checking that erodes deep work.

Frequently asked questions