[HN Gopher] Multi-Layered Calendars
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Multi-Layered Calendars
Author : bpierre
Score : 66 points
Date : 2023-07-06 15:27 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (julian.digital)
(TXT) w3m dump (julian.digital)
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| I just wish more companies communicated using iCalendar. In work
| calendar events are ubiquitous but I have found it really
| valuable to use them to organise my personal life as well. The
| problem is that it can be quite tedious to enter everything by
| hand. I wish cinemas, theatres, restaurants, hotels, airlines,
| train companies, etc etc, all sent you calendar appointments when
| you booked with them online. In my experience only a minority do
| and even the ones that do often don't do it right (eg, British
| Airways gets the timezone wrong).
|
| I also sometimes wonder if we couldn't create a better calendar
| event format using JSON or something, but iCalendar is powerful
| enough for 99% of use cases - I just wish it was used more.
| andrewrothman wrote:
| This might be of interest:
|
| RFC 8984 JSCalendar: A JSON Representation of Calendar Data
| https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8984.html
| ggm wrote:
| Well reasoned and compelling. I am sure others like me have
| wanted this.
|
| Lots of opportunities for improvement in existing s/w
| lloeki wrote:
| This echoes how my calendars are organised (and thoughts I had on
| calendars for the bits that cannot be implemented, Fantastical
| gets close... yet so far)
|
| Expanding on these "key moments", sometimes I wish I could create
| such durationless events (i.e a single datetime), but for these
| to show up properly I have to set a certain duration so that the
| label is readable at every sensible zoom level.
|
| In addition some time blocks I create represent not a block of a
| specific duration but a bracket where a specific durationless
| event will happen, e.g a delivery that was communicated by the
| delivery company as happening between 08:00 and 10:00.
|
| Regarding the past, I liberally edit to create a record of what
| really happened: there are recurring events for specific tasks or
| meetings, and if they happen earlier, later, shorter, or longer
| than was set I edit the event to reflect reality. This allows me
| to look back at e.g the past week and adjust expectations for the
| coming week accordingly instead of trying to bend reality to an
| idealised version that cannot happen and then wondering why
| things seem hectic when they appear so regular (e.g why do I feel
| like I'm always running late vs that block should really be 20
| min instead of 10 min). I also love the music playing and
| health/fitness tracking integrations, similarly Fantastical puts
| in 10 day weather forecasts, I do wish it would turn into hourly
| when possible + having history of weather (think about the
| defunct Dark Sky UI).
|
| Then there's future turning into present, and present turning
| into past: I also wish that integration with other bits of
| software would work better: an AFK block in my work calendar
| should change my Slack status and phone Focus mode (iOS), and me
| manually changing these should also automatically be recorded in
| my calendar.
|
| The above is mostly about me (scheduling, recording), which can
| be dispatched across many calendars one can create, but calendars
| serve another purpose, communication: from third parties e.g
| flights, trains, hotels booked; and to third parties e.g I am
| available, we'll be meeting, I am focusing, I am AFK but can
| still efficiently respond over Slack, I am not available at all,
| I am off for a day, I am off for half a day. The latter is
| stupidly interesting because the only ways to say that is either
| a full day event that a human has to parse or a solid block of
| time (and don't get me started on timeless (non-day events) that
| span multiple days, for which the UI is fantastically poor for
| every single implementation out there).
|
| Trouble starts because for each calendar account implementation
| out there there is only one main calendar that is considered
| "yours" and from which free/busy time is inferred.
|
| Trouble doubles down when "this main calendar" is actually
| _these_ main calendars, a simple example being personal account
| and work account. I want to be able to tell my SO that I am not
| available during this specific block because I have an important
| work meeting, and I want to tell my coworkers that I am not
| available during this specific block because I have something
| personal to attend to, _without having to manually duplicate the
| events_.
|
| I said duplicate but sometimes it's triplicate or quadruplicate
| because to work around things like that some teams implement
| shared calendars, and you have to fill those in as well, on top
| of changing Slack status and focus mode. (BTW props to
| Fantastical for thinking about making such duplicates appear as a
| single merged event with a hatched border or something)
| dgunay wrote:
| Ugh. 100%.
|
| > I said duplicate but sometimes it's triplicate or
| quadruplicate because to work around things like that some
| teams implement shared calendars, and you have to fill those in
| as well, on top of changing Slack status and focus mode.
|
| Google Calendar supports an out of office event type and still
| my company insists on having a shared out of office calendar.
| It's yet another thing I have to sync up with and it confounds
| attempts at building integrations. All so some manager
| somewhere can see who is on vacation at a glance.
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| Todos are already stored as calendar components and share a lot
| of properties in common (eg: they're icalendar components). It's
| just that most user interfaces either handle one or the other.
|
| Everything in this field has stagnated strongly for the last
| decade or so. 99% of the people use the 2 or 3 existing
| proprietary interfaces that are around, but these are impossible
| to improve since they're someone else's secret code.
| mastermedo wrote:
| I second the idea of revisiting the calendar. I add events in the
| calendar of what I've been doing every time I context switch. It
| makes it purposefully annoying to context switch often, and I
| revisit what I did that week at the end of it. Additionally, I'm
| able to answer questions such as "What percentage of time do I
| spend on research vs writing vs coding etc.
| gryn wrote:
| I've been using google calendar for the same thing, it make it
| easy to start dragging to log what task I've been doing, the
| fact that you can show multiple calendar and easily toggle
| between them helps with this theoretical plan vs what actually
| happened. there's also a script/webapp on github that help you
| sum the total time spent per timeunit per task or calendar.
|
| does anyone know of an open source calendar app with the same
| ui/ux ?
| _virtu wrote:
| I'm building a time block calendar app for some of the reasons
| mentioned in this article. Retrospective is the first big feature
| I would like to add so users can see what they have been doing on
| specific days in order to understand what types of interruptions
| they face.
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| Time management, project management, chat, calendars, email,
| operating systems themselves, all this shit we evolved into
| because we started with 8.3 char file limits, booting from floppy
| disks, other long forgotten hardware based concessions, and a
| host of other cruft we still haven't thrown off.
|
| Our interfaces are not based on first principles of reality or
| organized thinking, they're all just hodgepodge artifacts evolved
| from tty interfaces and limited input options that were
| supersceded by lowest common denominator GUIs and every hostile
| app trying to lock in user data.
|
| Only now are we starting to see a few "platform apps" start to
| converge towards slightly better taxonomies around calendars and
| tasks, the amount of context switching is still miserable
| overall.
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(page generated 2023-07-06 23:01 UTC)