Your work hours are the daily windows you've decided are work — Mon–Fri 9–17, Tue–Thu 10–16, however your week actually shapes up. They sound trivial. They're the single most load-bearing setting in any planning tool, because they're the boundary every other calculation respects.
Without explicit work hours, software defaults to "anywhere on the clock is fair game." Scheduling suggestions land at 8pm on a Sunday. Capacity math assumes a 168-hour week. Recurring blocks creep into evenings.
Why freelancers need them more than employees
Employed people have implicit work hours — the office is open, then it's closed. Freelancers have to declare them, in software, on purpose, or every system around them assumes 24/7. The declaration is also a negotiation with yourself: it's the moment you decide what counts as overtime, what counts as evening, and what gets the right to interrupt.
A common pattern in early freelance years: not setting work hours at all, working evenings and weekends out of vague guilt, then burning out at month 14. Setting work hours doesn't make the work easier — it makes the not-working possible.
How Ensaria relates
Set work hours once in Settings (defaults to Mon–Fri 09:00–17:00; per-day overrides supported). Every scheduling suggestion respects them: when Ensar picks a slot for a new task, it picks one inside your declared hours. Recurring work materialises only inside the window. Capacity for the week subtracts time outside work hours before showing you "available hours" — so the calm number you see is real.
The hours aren't enforced — you can still drop a block on a Sunday morning. Ensaria just stops suggesting it.
Related terms
- Capacity — what your work hours times days gives you.
- Recurring work — only schedules inside work hours by default.