5 ms·

Sketchy Calendar

156 points by surprisetalk 1y ago

AstroJetson 1y ago
I use pocket mod and make a custom 8 page todo/calendar that I use every day. It works well for me, but I’ve also adapted my life to the way it works.
- hiatus 1y ago
  How does it work?
  - AstroJetson 1y ago
    Your best bet is the pocketmod site: https://pocketmod.com/ https://pocketmod.com/ I use the offline version of the pocketmod program, I create a 8 page doc, print in PDF, then pocketmod changes that PDF into a single page that can be printed and folded.
- dfee 1y ago
  In the morning you copy your calendar by hand to the pocket mod? What about dynamic event changes (e.g. additions, subtractions and reschedules)? There’s something more optimal than my current attempt at strategic daily itineraries (which is quite poor) - a tug between the mechanical and the breathing, flexible and organic.
  - AstroJetson 1y ago
    A Pocket Mod is an 8 page book. I use two pages in Calendar format for big events, ie Birthdays, dinners, doctors, etc. My calendar is pretty much set for the week. There are 4 pages that cover the weekly schedule, 2 days per page. There is blank space on the bottom half of the last page to put reminders for the next week. This leaves me 2 pages for todo-lists. You can make the 8 pages anyway you want, print them as a 8 page PDF document. The Pocket Mod program then rearrange the pages into the right format for folding. If I need to create a new one it's under a minute to run the process, fold and cut the book.
Brajeshwar 1y ago
If you want to try something in these lines, David Seah has some pretty awesome printables perfected over the years. I’ve used them like 10+ years ago, and I still like to print out some copies and tinker around. However, I have changed my ways of using pen and paper. His work is extremely detailed. I heard many restaurants have standardized on some of this work. https://davidseah.com/productivity-tools/ https://davidseah.com/productivity-tools/
- y-curious 1y ago
  Thank you so much for this. I went down the rabbit hole on this guy's website and he is obsessed with categorization. I can't wait to try the emergent task list. I hope I don't use it for a week and then stop :$
n8cpdx 1y ago
> If you have tentative plans like “lunch with a friend sometime next week” there is no obvious way to add this to your calendar in a way that differentiates it from an important appointment that can’t be missed. Does Google Calendar not let you mark events as tentative? Outlook does and I’ve always taken that for granted. Speaking of Outlook, they used to have a board view that I think was conceptually quite close to achieving the large free form canvas experience of a paper calendar. Retired years ago though. https://www.computerworld.com/article/1616186/how-to-use-outlooks-new-calendar-board-view-to-organize-your-work.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/1616186/how-to-use-out...
- storgaard 1y ago
  You can events as tentative in Google Calendar by responding with "Maybe".
  - jimkleiber 1y ago
    Yes but that would require booking a full-day event for all 7 days in the week if you wanted to say "sometime next week," or at least I assume it would.
- deafpolygon 1y ago
  I often put tentative plans in a separate "Calendar" and reassign it to the category if necessary. Then I can turn "off" the other calendars and see only the tentative plans to zero in on stuff I have yet to deal with. If I have a shared calendar, I will title it with (tentative) and promote it by removing the tag.
ErrorNoBrain 1y ago
i need a digital calendar because i share it and other people put things into the calendar, that i need to know of.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
nicbou 1y ago
I'm really hoping for a sketchy map. I really wish I could use my iPad Mini to plan motorcycle trips.
- lugarlugarlugar 1y ago
  They've made a prototype for that: https://www.inkandswitch.com/embark/ https://www.inkandswitch.com/embark/ Sadly not released.
  - wonger_ 1y ago
    Someone released a similar trip-planning webapp: https://waypoint.jakelazaroff.com/ https://waypoint.jakelazaroff.com/ Blog post: https://jakelazaroff.com/words/a-local-first-case-study/ https://jakelazaroff.com/words/a-local-first-case-study/
  - gklitt 1y ago
    We're happy to share the Embark prototype with anyone who wants to try it out - just email me at geoffrey@inkandswitch.com and I can share a link with you. A couple reasons we've decided not to share the demo widely: 1) it's research software, not developed to the quality standards of a commercial product, so we don't want people to get confused or disappointed by that, 2) the prototype heavily uses the paid Google Maps API. We've also publicly released demos of some related work, like Potluck, an interactive medium built on text notes: https://www.inkandswitch.com/potluck/demo/ https://www.inkandswitch.com/potluck/demo/
- WillAdams 1y ago
  I'd really like to see a mapping software which was flexible enough, and informative enough to allow ad hoc hybrid route planning --- hoping to take up bike rafting at some point in the near future, so an idea trip would be: - park the vehicle near where the trip will ultimately terminate near to a water access point (so need to know about ramp presence and parking) - pedal in to some remote water area where one can transition from bike to raft - by water explore a bit, optionally gain access to some area which is remote and not normally accessible by bike, land and possibly ride around a bit (only if area will not be damaged by bike tires) - exit area by going downstream --- but no rough rapids since I'm not young anymore and have had my fill of fishing gear out of the water and refloating a canoe/kayak, arriving at the vehicle after a fairly easy bit of paddling If someone has a good suggestion for a map which provides this information in a consistent and reliable and accessible format, I'd be glad --- my first couple of attempts at route-planning have had me opening multiple sites/windows/views to the point where keeping track of which information I was trying to get from which window became a chore.
deafpolygon 1y ago
I am curious to see how this unfolds. I know that for many people, myself included, that the main appeal of a digital calendar is the edit-ability of it. I can move, edit, and even copy. And it's in text format (as opposed to ink) so that also means "readable" (in contrast to the chicken scratch that is my handwriting) and searchable.
- zuhsetaqi 1y ago
  And also the ability to share the calendar.
racingmars 1y ago
I'm looking forward to see how this develops. There was a program a long time ago, classic Mac OS days, and I don't remember the name of it but I think it was "<something> Consistency". I loved it because tasks in it were "loose," in the sense that something like "water the plants" didn't have to happen on a strict 7-day repeating event. It could be defined as "should be done 6-8 days after the last time I did it." So when you hit "done" on the current "water the plants" task, it automatically fuzzy-scheduled the next "water the plants" event with a target date of 6-8 days after when you clicked done. You could have the range prefer some days but be "acceptable" for a wider range of days. Someone once told me emacs org-mode might be able to schedule recurring tasks somewhat like this. But any time I see a new calendar/to-do manager application, I hope the designers keep this "fuzzy" repeating event idea in mind!
- enricozb 1y ago
  Maybe Sciral Consistency?
  - racingmars 1y ago
    That was it, yes! Thank you!
- endlessvoid94 1y ago
  Things 3 has a sort of recurring todo like what you're describing, where you can set like this: https://culturedcode.com/things/support/articles/2803564/ https://culturedcode.com/things/support/articles/2803564/
ivape 1y ago
This kind of exists with things like RocketBook and Neo smartpens. They require special books for the latter: https://shop.neosmartpen.com/collections/journals-notebooks/products/planner-for-2025-neo-smart-planner https://shop.neosmartpen.com/collections/journals-notebooks/... LLMs are good enough that if you can stand up a small video capturing app on your iphone, then you can live transcribe. I believe the LLMs are good enough that if you just write legibly, then you can give it ad-hoc commands in any way you want (e.g "Add this to iCal"). A cheap document reader gets your half way there: https://www.amazon.com/Kitchbai-Document-Visualiser-Microphones-Foldable/dp/B0BB2Q8RK6 https://www.amazon.com/Kitchbai-Document-Visualiser-Micropho... I'm expecting something like this to be part of the suite of devices OpenAI will release. Shifting away from tapping things into phones all the time to leveraging all of the mechanical things we do outside of phones. The product would be an aesthetic document scanner with a mic, so you can make comprehensive notes with additional voice transcribing. Seems like an ideal thing to have on a scratchpad desk for quick notes, because eink note-takes are actually really good now days (just overpriced).
romuloalves 1y ago
Excited to see what comes out of this. Like many others, I struggle to keep up with a Calendar app. They don't give satisfaction when using them, making it harder to stick with them day after day. Using pen & paper, I have a hard time following my schedule because I don't receive notifications when an event or time block is about to start. LOL
- zuhsetaqi 1y ago
  > Using pen & paper, I have a hard time following my schedule because I don't receive notifications when an event or time block is about to start. LOL Every morning just create a timer for each event. It’s super fast with Siri/Google Assistant, the prompt is just „Timer <time of the event>“ and it sets a timer. You could also create alarms but with timers you get the benefit to see how much time is left until the event starts.
koliber 1y ago
I struggled with this problem for a long time. I sort of solved it. The key was to realize that there is a difference between a calendar, a todo list, and an agenda. A todo list is a list of things that need to be done but usually don’t have a specific time when they need to be done at. They can have priorities or deadlines or fuzzy target dates like “next week.” A calendar is for storing future concretely scheduled events. An agenda is a list of things that will happen soon. Each day I pull things from my calendar, todo list, and prior agenda and create my daily agenda. I also keep notes, doodles, clippings, and references in my agenda. I use Google calendar as my calendar. It meets my expectations. For my todo list I use Notion. I break it down into “next, soon, and later”. I add ad-hoc sections like “after the vacation” when needed. Some todo items are scheduled for a specific day or “not sooner than.” I add these to my calendar with an email reminder so they don’t take up any mind space until needed. Finally, the daily agenda. I use Notion but could probably use a physical notepad. I like being able to archive them as sometimes I need to check when I did something or pull some details from notes. With a digital agenda I can file it into an archive easily. This is not perfect but it helped me reconcile the rigidity of calendar tools with the need to do keep things freeform in the short term.
- 8organicbits 1y ago
  I'll add to this to say that I think there are different kinds of todo lists as well. I wrote about [1] a struggle I had with digitizing a whiteboard household chore tracker. Lately I've been wondering if LLMs can help personalize software. There are so many difference needs users have, yet software is written with a pool of users in mind. I'm very skeptical of LLMs for traditional software projects, but small one-off personal utilities or tweaking existing tools seems more viable. [1] https://alexsci.com/blog/personal-apps/ https://alexsci.com/blog/personal-apps/
  - pflenker 1y ago
    It's surprising how many "to do lists" don't really model "to do"s correctly. They confuse reminders (I do not want to forget something so I want to be reminded) with todos (I want to do something), they confuse a start date (I want to start working on something now, but if it's still not done tomorrow it's OK) with a due date (if I don't do it by then I'll be in a lot of trouble), and they give us a lot of knobs to turn, like priority, tags, dependencies, sub-lists and so on, which are not always useful. At the same time, absolutely basic recurring functionality is surprisingly often broken or not implemented correctly, like "I want to write my update on every work day, but if I forget it once, I don't want to write it twice". Even things, one of the top apps in the space, annoyingly doesn't allow me to check off a recurring item before its start date. I absolutely love the simplicity of Bullet Journal here: A piece of paper, a dot, some words, that's the todo. Add some doodle next to it, like an asterisk or an exclamation mark, if you need to highlight it. That's it. Too bad recurring tasks come with a lot of manual overhead there.
rollcat 1y ago
I like it that Apple's Calendar app now includes scheduled TODOs from Reminders. I love checklists (early adopter and fan of Trello; sadly it's well past its peak), so Reminders is now a natural way to organise them. I can add a due date (and optionally, time), when I will get a notification. Overdue reminders still show up in the "today" view. So for things like "lunch with a friend", I just set due date to whenever I should follow up, postpone until actually scheduled, and it continues to show up both in my reminders and in the calendar. It works for me. As for the more free-form stuff, I keep a journal in Notes. I have a shortcut that looks for today's note in the "journal" folder, and if none is found, creates it; then it inserts the current timestamp. I can just start writing whatever comes to my mind. Since the journal is already organised by date, I can always look back. I only wish I could run the shortcut straight from the Notes app.
WillAdams 1y ago
I really wish Amazon would either hire these folks, or license their ideas/concepts/applications for the Kindle Scribe.
klimeryk 1y ago
Self-plug: I created https://recalendar.me/ https://recalendar.me/ (open-source and always free) to solve this from a different perspective. It allows creating highly customized PDF calendars for e-ink tablets like ReMarkable. This gives you the "sketchy" part, making it more natural to input, doodle, make notes. But extensively utilize PDF links to make it easy to navigate the calendar. Plus other features, like pre-filling anniversaries/birthdays, custom templates per day, week, month, etc. to make it yours, fitting your particular needs. For example, I added an extra page after each Thursday, cause I always had some notes after therapy session then. Unfortunately, something that's fundamentally hard to do with this approach is having a dynamic sync with an online calendar. That's because ultimately it's a PDF, with some device-specific layer with writing on top of it. But in some ways, it could be seen as feature - I find it useful to copy "manually" the events to my ReCalendar. That automatically makes me reflect on them or just help me remember they're happening! Of course, YMMV, good to have different options!
- spencerflem 1y ago
  Cool, this is really lovely stuff! Almost makes me want to get a ReMarkable just to try it out :)
- tecleandor 1y ago
  Have you though about adding synchronization from iCal calendars? I was trying to find (or create) a tool to substitute Remarcal, that I'm using now with my Remarkable. It's working so-so lately, and it only works with a Remarkable (and I was thinking to switch to a Supernote I have around .
  - klimeryk 1y ago
    ReCalendar supports loading any ICS file - but since you ultimately generate a PDF for the whole year, it will just load the events present at that moment in the calendar (see https://github.com/klimeryk/recalendar.js/issues/11#issuecomment-1004761777 https://github.com/klimeryk/recalendar.js/issues/11#issuecom...). So it's good for quickly loading all the holidays in a given country or if you have some long-term recurring events. But it's not feasible to keep on syncing the calendar every day.
spencerflem 1y ago
I think the idea is for the top part of each day's view- the little square that lists the date- to be what's visible when you're looking at an entire month. If so, I like it! Gives the option to work on both time scales at once. The whole idea is lovely, pen tablet drawing is so much more expressive than any other form of input we have
alberth 1y ago
I'm surprised the author doesn't use color coded labels (e.g. red=important, yellow=Hold-Event, etc) to solve a huge portion of their described problems ... as well as using Tasks functionality (that you can find from Google Calendar, Outlook, etc)
kentosi-dw 1y ago
Unless I read this wrong, it sounds like the author is after a calendar background template that they can write over on their tablet (or ReMarkable/etc) device. I mean that's basically what that last screenshot looked like to me...
thoughtpeddler 1y ago
Remarkable to see this blog post, just a few days after I'd seen the HEY Calendar [0] for the first time, and asked an LLM about how I could recreate its unique features within my macOS calendar app of choice: Flexibits Fantastical [1]. I didn't get very far with it, but for those interested, here's what I think are the "sketch-based" features (per author's post) that HEY allows for that are sorely missing in all digital calendar software: - Bar at the bottom of the GUI called "Sometime this week" that shows tasks/events that mentally fit into the frame of "should be done sometime this week, just not sure exactly when" - Habits (that you can easily check off if completed) [plus associated aggregate tracking] - Tracked/Logged-Time (a.k.a. "retrospective calendaring") - Freetime visualization (the HEY Calendar visually highlights long uninterrupted blocks of freetime) - Add images or a label to a specific day (without being an event itself; a purely graphical signifier) - Built-in countdown-type events, with associated UI element that counts down for you My main desire is not switch calendaring platforms, but to figure out how to 'bolt-on' these capabilities in what I'm already living in. -- [0] https://www.hey.com/calendar/ https://www.hey.com/calendar/ [1] https://flexibits.com/fantastical https://flexibits.com/fantastical

156 points by surprisetalk 1y ago

I use pocket mod and make a custom 8 page todo/calendar that I use every day. It works well for me, but I’ve also adapted my life to the way it works.

hiatus 1y ago
How does it work?
- AstroJetson 1y ago
  Your best bet is the pocketmod site: https://pocketmod.com/ https://pocketmod.com/ I use the offline version of the pocketmod program, I create a 8 page doc, print in PDF, then pocketmod changes that PDF into a single page that can be printed and folded.
dfee 1y ago
In the morning you copy your calendar by hand to the pocket mod? What about dynamic event changes (e.g. additions, subtractions and reschedules)? There’s something more optimal than my current attempt at strategic daily itineraries (which is quite poor) - a tug between the mechanical and the breathing, flexible and organic.
- AstroJetson 1y ago
  A Pocket Mod is an 8 page book. I use two pages in Calendar format for big events, ie Birthdays, dinners, doctors, etc. My calendar is pretty much set for the week. There are 4 pages that cover the weekly schedule, 2 days per page. There is blank space on the bottom half of the last page to put reminders for the next week. This leaves me 2 pages for todo-lists. You can make the 8 pages anyway you want, print them as a 8 page PDF document. The Pocket Mod program then rearrange the pages into the right format for folding. If I need to create a new one it's under a minute to run the process, fold and cut the book.

Brajeshwar 1y ago

If you want to try something in these lines, David Seah has some pretty awesome printables perfected over the years. I’ve used them like 10+ years ago, and I still like to print out some copies and tinker around. However, I have changed my ways of using pen and paper. His work is extremely detailed. I heard many restaurants have standardized on some of this work. https://davidseah.com/productivity-tools/ https://davidseah.com/productivity-tools/

y-curious 1y ago
Thank you so much for this. I went down the rabbit hole on this guy's website and he is obsessed with categorization. I can't wait to try the emergent task list. I hope I don't use it for a week and then stop :$

n8cpdx 1y ago

> If you have tentative plans like “lunch with a friend sometime next week” there is no obvious way to add this to your calendar in a way that differentiates it from an important appointment that can’t be missed. Does Google Calendar not let you mark events as tentative? Outlook does and I’ve always taken that for granted. Speaking of Outlook, they used to have a board view that I think was conceptually quite close to achieving the large free form canvas experience of a paper calendar. Retired years ago though. https://www.computerworld.com/article/1616186/how-to-use-outlooks-new-calendar-board-view-to-organize-your-work.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/1616186/how-to-use-out...

storgaard 1y ago
You can events as tentative in Google Calendar by responding with "Maybe".
- jimkleiber 1y ago
  Yes but that would require booking a full-day event for all 7 days in the week if you wanted to say "sometime next week," or at least I assume it would.
deafpolygon 1y ago
I often put tentative plans in a separate "Calendar" and reassign it to the category if necessary. Then I can turn "off" the other calendars and see only the tentative plans to zero in on stuff I have yet to deal with. If I have a shared calendar, I will title it with (tentative) and promote it by removing the tag.

ErrorNoBrain 1y ago

i need a digital calendar because i share it and other people put things into the calendar, that i need to know of.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

nicbou 1y ago

I'm really hoping for a sketchy map. I really wish I could use my iPad Mini to plan motorcycle trips.

lugarlugarlugar 1y ago
They've made a prototype for that: https://www.inkandswitch.com/embark/ https://www.inkandswitch.com/embark/ Sadly not released.
- wonger_ 1y ago
  Someone released a similar trip-planning webapp: https://waypoint.jakelazaroff.com/ https://waypoint.jakelazaroff.com/ Blog post: https://jakelazaroff.com/words/a-local-first-case-study/ https://jakelazaroff.com/words/a-local-first-case-study/
- gklitt 1y ago
  We're happy to share the Embark prototype with anyone who wants to try it out - just email me at geoffrey@inkandswitch.com and I can share a link with you. A couple reasons we've decided not to share the demo widely: 1) it's research software, not developed to the quality standards of a commercial product, so we don't want people to get confused or disappointed by that, 2) the prototype heavily uses the paid Google Maps API. We've also publicly released demos of some related work, like Potluck, an interactive medium built on text notes: https://www.inkandswitch.com/potluck/demo/ https://www.inkandswitch.com/potluck/demo/
WillAdams 1y ago
I'd really like to see a mapping software which was flexible enough, and informative enough to allow ad hoc hybrid route planning --- hoping to take up bike rafting at some point in the near future, so an idea trip would be: - park the vehicle near where the trip will ultimately terminate near to a water access point (so need to know about ramp presence and parking) - pedal in to some remote water area where one can transition from bike to raft - by water explore a bit, optionally gain access to some area which is remote and not normally accessible by bike, land and possibly ride around a bit (only if area will not be damaged by bike tires) - exit area by going downstream --- but no rough rapids since I'm not young anymore and have had my fill of fishing gear out of the water and refloating a canoe/kayak, arriving at the vehicle after a fairly easy bit of paddling If someone has a good suggestion for a map which provides this information in a consistent and reliable and accessible format, I'd be glad --- my first couple of attempts at route-planning have had me opening multiple sites/windows/views to the point where keeping track of which information I was trying to get from which window became a chore.

deafpolygon 1y ago

I am curious to see how this unfolds. I know that for many people, myself included, that the main appeal of a digital calendar is the edit-ability of it. I can move, edit, and even copy. And it's in text format (as opposed to ink) so that also means "readable" (in contrast to the chicken scratch that is my handwriting) and searchable.

zuhsetaqi 1y ago
And also the ability to share the calendar.

racingmars 1y ago

I'm looking forward to see how this develops. There was a program a long time ago, classic Mac OS days, and I don't remember the name of it but I think it was "<something> Consistency". I loved it because tasks in it were "loose," in the sense that something like "water the plants" didn't have to happen on a strict 7-day repeating event. It could be defined as "should be done 6-8 days after the last time I did it." So when you hit "done" on the current "water the plants" task, it automatically fuzzy-scheduled the next "water the plants" event with a target date of 6-8 days after when you clicked done. You could have the range prefer some days but be "acceptable" for a wider range of days. Someone once told me emacs org-mode might be able to schedule recurring tasks somewhat like this. But any time I see a new calendar/to-do manager application, I hope the designers keep this "fuzzy" repeating event idea in mind!

enricozb 1y ago
Maybe Sciral Consistency?
- racingmars 1y ago
  That was it, yes! Thank you!
endlessvoid94 1y ago
Things 3 has a sort of recurring todo like what you're describing, where you can set like this: https://culturedcode.com/things/support/articles/2803564/ https://culturedcode.com/things/support/articles/2803564/

ivape 1y ago

This kind of exists with things like RocketBook and Neo smartpens. They require special books for the latter: https://shop.neosmartpen.com/collections/journals-notebooks/products/planner-for-2025-neo-smart-planner https://shop.neosmartpen.com/collections/journals-notebooks/... LLMs are good enough that if you can stand up a small video capturing app on your iphone, then you can live transcribe. I believe the LLMs are good enough that if you just write legibly, then you can give it ad-hoc commands in any way you want (e.g "Add this to iCal"). A cheap document reader gets your half way there: https://www.amazon.com/Kitchbai-Document-Visualiser-Microphones-Foldable/dp/B0BB2Q8RK6 https://www.amazon.com/Kitchbai-Document-Visualiser-Micropho... I'm expecting something like this to be part of the suite of devices OpenAI will release. Shifting away from tapping things into phones all the time to leveraging all of the mechanical things we do outside of phones. The product would be an aesthetic document scanner with a mic, so you can make comprehensive notes with additional voice transcribing. Seems like an ideal thing to have on a scratchpad desk for quick notes, because eink note-takes are actually really good now days (just overpriced).

romuloalves 1y ago

Excited to see what comes out of this. Like many others, I struggle to keep up with a Calendar app. They don't give satisfaction when using them, making it harder to stick with them day after day. Using pen & paper, I have a hard time following my schedule because I don't receive notifications when an event or time block is about to start. LOL

zuhsetaqi 1y ago
> Using pen & paper, I have a hard time following my schedule because I don't receive notifications when an event or time block is about to start. LOL Every morning just create a timer for each event. It’s super fast with Siri/Google Assistant, the prompt is just „Timer <time of the event>“ and it sets a timer. You could also create alarms but with timers you get the benefit to see how much time is left until the event starts.

koliber 1y ago

I struggled with this problem for a long time. I sort of solved it. The key was to realize that there is a difference between a calendar, a todo list, and an agenda. A todo list is a list of things that need to be done but usually don’t have a specific time when they need to be done at. They can have priorities or deadlines or fuzzy target dates like “next week.” A calendar is for storing future concretely scheduled events. An agenda is a list of things that will happen soon. Each day I pull things from my calendar, todo list, and prior agenda and create my daily agenda. I also keep notes, doodles, clippings, and references in my agenda. I use Google calendar as my calendar. It meets my expectations. For my todo list I use Notion. I break it down into “next, soon, and later”. I add ad-hoc sections like “after the vacation” when needed. Some todo items are scheduled for a specific day or “not sooner than.” I add these to my calendar with an email reminder so they don’t take up any mind space until needed. Finally, the daily agenda. I use Notion but could probably use a physical notepad. I like being able to archive them as sometimes I need to check when I did something or pull some details from notes. With a digital agenda I can file it into an archive easily. This is not perfect but it helped me reconcile the rigidity of calendar tools with the need to do keep things freeform in the short term.

8organicbits 1y ago
I'll add to this to say that I think there are different kinds of todo lists as well. I wrote about [1] a struggle I had with digitizing a whiteboard household chore tracker. Lately I've been wondering if LLMs can help personalize software. There are so many difference needs users have, yet software is written with a pool of users in mind. I'm very skeptical of LLMs for traditional software projects, but small one-off personal utilities or tweaking existing tools seems more viable. [1] https://alexsci.com/blog/personal-apps/ https://alexsci.com/blog/personal-apps/
- pflenker 1y ago
  It's surprising how many "to do lists" don't really model "to do"s correctly. They confuse reminders (I do not want to forget something so I want to be reminded) with todos (I want to do something), they confuse a start date (I want to start working on something now, but if it's still not done tomorrow it's OK) with a due date (if I don't do it by then I'll be in a lot of trouble), and they give us a lot of knobs to turn, like priority, tags, dependencies, sub-lists and so on, which are not always useful. At the same time, absolutely basic recurring functionality is surprisingly often broken or not implemented correctly, like "I want to write my update on every work day, but if I forget it once, I don't want to write it twice". Even things, one of the top apps in the space, annoyingly doesn't allow me to check off a recurring item before its start date. I absolutely love the simplicity of Bullet Journal here: A piece of paper, a dot, some words, that's the todo. Add some doodle next to it, like an asterisk or an exclamation mark, if you need to highlight it. That's it. Too bad recurring tasks come with a lot of manual overhead there.

rollcat 1y ago

I like it that Apple's Calendar app now includes scheduled TODOs from Reminders. I love checklists (early adopter and fan of Trello; sadly it's well past its peak), so Reminders is now a natural way to organise them. I can add a due date (and optionally, time), when I will get a notification. Overdue reminders still show up in the "today" view. So for things like "lunch with a friend", I just set due date to whenever I should follow up, postpone until actually scheduled, and it continues to show up both in my reminders and in the calendar. It works for me. As for the more free-form stuff, I keep a journal in Notes. I have a shortcut that looks for today's note in the "journal" folder, and if none is found, creates it; then it inserts the current timestamp. I can just start writing whatever comes to my mind. Since the journal is already organised by date, I can always look back. I only wish I could run the shortcut straight from the Notes app.

WillAdams 1y ago

I really wish Amazon would either hire these folks, or license their ideas/concepts/applications for the Kindle Scribe.

klimeryk 1y ago

Self-plug: I created https://recalendar.me/ https://recalendar.me/ (open-source and always free) to solve this from a different perspective. It allows creating highly customized PDF calendars for e-ink tablets like ReMarkable. This gives you the "sketchy" part, making it more natural to input, doodle, make notes. But extensively utilize PDF links to make it easy to navigate the calendar. Plus other features, like pre-filling anniversaries/birthdays, custom templates per day, week, month, etc. to make it yours, fitting your particular needs. For example, I added an extra page after each Thursday, cause I always had some notes after therapy session then. Unfortunately, something that's fundamentally hard to do with this approach is having a dynamic sync with an online calendar. That's because ultimately it's a PDF, with some device-specific layer with writing on top of it. But in some ways, it could be seen as feature - I find it useful to copy "manually" the events to my ReCalendar. That automatically makes me reflect on them or just help me remember they're happening! Of course, YMMV, good to have different options!

spencerflem 1y ago
Cool, this is really lovely stuff! Almost makes me want to get a ReMarkable just to try it out :)
tecleandor 1y ago
Have you though about adding synchronization from iCal calendars? I was trying to find (or create) a tool to substitute Remarcal, that I'm using now with my Remarkable. It's working so-so lately, and it only works with a Remarkable (and I was thinking to switch to a Supernote I have around .
- klimeryk 1y ago
  ReCalendar supports loading any ICS file - but since you ultimately generate a PDF for the whole year, it will just load the events present at that moment in the calendar (see https://github.com/klimeryk/recalendar.js/issues/11#issuecomment-1004761777 https://github.com/klimeryk/recalendar.js/issues/11#issuecom...). So it's good for quickly loading all the holidays in a given country or if you have some long-term recurring events. But it's not feasible to keep on syncing the calendar every day.

spencerflem 1y ago

I think the idea is for the top part of each day's view- the little square that lists the date- to be what's visible when you're looking at an entire month. If so, I like it! Gives the option to work on both time scales at once. The whole idea is lovely, pen tablet drawing is so much more expressive than any other form of input we have

alberth 1y ago

I'm surprised the author doesn't use color coded labels (e.g. red=important, yellow=Hold-Event, etc) to solve a huge portion of their described problems ... as well as using Tasks functionality (that you can find from Google Calendar, Outlook, etc)

kentosi-dw 1y ago

Unless I read this wrong, it sounds like the author is after a calendar background template that they can write over on their tablet (or ReMarkable/etc) device. I mean that's basically what that last screenshot looked like to me...

thoughtpeddler 1y ago

Remarkable to see this blog post, just a few days after I'd seen the HEY Calendar [0] for the first time, and asked an LLM about how I could recreate its unique features within my macOS calendar app of choice: Flexibits Fantastical [1]. I didn't get very far with it, but for those interested, here's what I think are the "sketch-based" features (per author's post) that HEY allows for that are sorely missing in all digital calendar software: - Bar at the bottom of the GUI called "Sometime this week" that shows tasks/events that mentally fit into the frame of "should be done sometime this week, just not sure exactly when" - Habits (that you can easily check off if completed) [plus associated aggregate tracking] - Tracked/Logged-Time (a.k.a. "retrospective calendaring") - Freetime visualization (the HEY Calendar visually highlights long uninterrupted blocks of freetime) - Add images or a label to a specific day (without being an event itself; a purely graphical signifier) - Built-in countdown-type events, with associated UI element that counts down for you My main desire is not switch calendaring platforms, but to figure out how to 'bolt-on' these capabilities in what I'm already living in. -- [0] https://www.hey.com/calendar/ https://www.hey.com/calendar/ [1] https://flexibits.com/fantastical https://flexibits.com/fantastical