I use Google Calendar heavily, averaging ~10 entries per day for the last 5+ years, and then some entries per day all the way back to when it was launched.
I can put information in easily enough, and with a few IFTTT recipes I'm able to treat Google Calendar not just as a schedule for upcoming events, appointments and reminders, but as a historical log of everything I've done. It is a time based database of my life... a diary.
I've automated my diary taking into Google Calendar. The what, where and when of everything ends up in one of 12 calendars (each calendar is effectively a label to categorise a whole group of events that have occurred).
And it's brilliant.
Except for the search.
It's really difficult to get the information back out. If I search for something I know that has happened, or has happened frequently, Google will delightfully tell me that I have matched 200 results, and then show me a list of 9 or 10 of them, with no way to paginate the remainder or search the old ones (it only finds upcoming, not past).
Search is broken on Google Calendar, to the point of being almost totally useless.
Far better to rely on time as a search dimension and jump around dates until one manually finds whatever you were looking for. It's that broken.
Compare to search on a product that has some love: Google Photos. Where now the miraculous occurs, I can search things like "Felicity skiing" and what will return are photos of my wife skiing, and an option to look at all other photos on those days. A simple search and all the results you want, and a single click to expand to view it in the wider context that makes sense.
Google Calendar really needs a decent search. It feels far too much like writing to /dev/null at the moment. Your information went in there, but the chances of you finding it when you wish to reference it are pretty non-existent.
Exactly that's the reason I want to drop all Google products. Until now I found an alternative to Gmail. Google Reader went bust and I live happily without it. Google Calendar is the last bit I need to find an alternative for.
I thought that all you hackers here are more independent than me. Why don't you create your own local "Google Calendar"? no one will judge you for the quality.
Everything in my Google Calendar is already out there somewhere. Nothing private is in it.
All I'm doing is making all of that data useful to me. It's not anything that isn't already available to someone or everyone.
I compartmentalise public and private, but don't consider things that create metadata elsewhere on the internet to be private. Anything public, is in my calendar.
Also...
> Why don't you create your own local "Google Calendar"? no one will judge you for the quality.
Time is hard.
Places are hard.
Being able to describe an event that is "Flight BA0285 from LHR to SFO" involves a single event over a duration of time, that crosses time zones, and maybe daylight savings, whilst changing places. And further knowing that BA0285 is a flight number and then informing you of delays.
This stuff is way harder than it initially looks, and makes me really appreciate just how right Google got this.
I have an Ubuntu laptop, a Macbook, a Windows 8 desktop computer, an iPhone and an Android tablet. You can't even write a website to fit all these sizes on your own, and some of them are a pain in the ass if it comes to using shells or ssh (the iPhone and the Windows computer more than the rest). Google is the only product line I know of that keeps all my data in a fashion that I can access it and make use of it (i.e. respond to messages from others and get reminded of appointments etc)
Baikal [1] is another alternative. It works fine for me.
Unfortunately CalDAV is quite an awkward standard for calendars and not supported by everything, so none of these implementations are perfect, but for my purposes it works well and I've found enough things that support it. It also supports CardDAV which can be used for contact syncing.
Also, to be as effective as Google Calendar, you'd have to end up integrating it with as many external sources as Google Calendar, decreasing any privacy you might have gained by making your own product.
There are already various servers you can set up at home or on a personal server based on CardDAV, which is an open standard for exactly this purpose. I set one up for myself in a day, and I can easily access it on my phone and, from a web UI, on my computers, in my email client, etc.
It's fairly widely supported and you can use it with various calendar apps and programs, but unfortunately the standard is a bit awkward and it's still not as widely supported as things like Google Calendar.
No one else mentioned network effects. I have a shared family calendar for my wife, son (readonly), and myself. Also my son's scout pack used a shared calendar for his meetings. And I was the treasurer for a volunteer org and they drank the goog koolaide top to bottom. Its not just using owncloud calendar, but making it 100% interoperable all the time with the rest of the network, which has agency and as per the linked article they change stuff when THEY feel like it because they're SaaS, not when its convenient for me to develop and test interoperability.
Finally it a very low level tool. I have a nice set of unfortunately expensive Wiha screwdrivers on my lab bench. That does not mean I'm dependent on Wiha... in less than a half hour I could have dramatically inferior yet more or less interoperable products from Craftsman or no-name Chinese or other on my lab bench. Or, this was typed on an old Dell keyboard, but as a very low level tool I'm not controlled or defined by such a low level tool... its just my primary Model M is plugged into something else at this moment so I'm stuck on an inferior mushy keyboard.
I'm looking to do the same thing and the best contender so far seems to be FastMail. For $40/yr there's 15GB for mail, 5GB file storage, IMAP, CalDAV, CardDAV, custom domain and web views for all of it. The DAV stuff is hard to find anywhere else that isn't under a huge price tag.
I'm also using google calendar heavily for my daily live. I usually use it to plan and keep track of my goals/habits too. I really like the idea to have appointments, goals/habits, events, shared calendars for work, family etc. and see my life and my time in one place.
I've wrote a little web app which helps me to keep on track with my habits. You can define a spec for a habit like 'play the guitar each day' or 'sports 3 times a week' and it connects to my google calendar and looks if my current weeks past and planned events match the habit specs. It's very powerfull. Overall I'll automate everything I can in my google calendar with recurring events to have the bare minimum of effort managing it.
I was really annoyed when a meeting I scheduled for 2:00 every Friday changed to 1:00 after falling back from DST to standard time. Google's helpful explanation: "Google Calendar uses Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to help avoid issues with daylight savings time."
Glad am not the only one who faces this problem. Search on Google calendar is terrible. What I'd love is a Apple timeline like interface that is searchable by natural language. Wishful thinking :)
Someone asked about how I do this stuff, and I guess why... I replied privately but the answer can be public:
It's part manual, part-automated.
I manually add travel itinerary items, tickets (for sports, shows, concerts), etc... at the time of purchase, with enough information such that I could arrive somewhere and that calendar entry can tell me everything... i.e. I even attach PDF tickets to calendar entries. I don't trust the automated Gmail stuff for this as I want to be sure it really got every important detail right.
Then there's some IFTTT automation. These are things like "If I make a public Tweet" or "If I post to Instagram" or "If I bookmark something on Pinboard" or "If I make a dinner reservation via Open Table" (that recipe looks at my Gmail, the others directly connect to Twitter, Instagram, Pinboard, etc). All those kinds of things are automated.
Then I use an Android app called SMS Backup to insert a log of all phone calls I made... the person I called or received a call from. Those are automated too.
I don't actually put everything into Google Calendar though. I only put things that I regard as public. So messages I've sent via Signal, or watching a film at home with my wife or having friends over... those things are private and didn't end up in any calendar.
What I'm going for is: If the metadata is out in the world somewhere, then it should serve me more than it serves anyone else.
I copy that metadata back into Google Calendar and the way it serves me is that I can always view everything I've done publicly in a wider context: Tweeted that, bookmarked this, purchased that book on Wordy. I get to glue together information from several systems and that is the essence of the diary, I get to see stories of my life in my own metadata.
Final note: It's a delicate system. I've been doing it for years and it needs love to maintain all of the integrations. A few I've abandoned along the way (I used to record the audio of phonecalls, upload to Drive, and link from the Google Calendar event... but this was fragile, and the voice wasn't indexed or searchable so could never answer questions like "When did I call x about y?"... the metadata of who I called was enough, so I abandoned the sound).
Hope all that helps. And I'm afraid I don't have much code to show for this.
Things I'm missing: Google Fit and Google Maps Timeline integrations.
If any Google Calendar team member wants to hear more, I have a lot of views on what could be done with Calendar to make it a really awesome tool for a "plan this, log that" diary that helps create and tell stories of our lives. I'm in SF next month and can meet if you want. Contact details in my profile.
Hey, I do many things similarly (track connections with people, record movies watch etc. Nowhere near to the level of detail you've experimented with, but I've dreamt of using calendar as a database of life too, or at least some kind of timeline-based experience that sewed the various facts about my life (phonecall with x, meet with y) and presented it in useful ways. Nice to see someone else thinking along the same lines.
You see the little calendar on the left hand side? Click the date there to choose the "from" date for filtering the search. Completely unintuitive and undiscoverable IMO and only found out about it when googling the issue.
You tried reporting it? I hate reporting things to them because their feedback seems tuned to discourage that behaviour, but between that and complaining here I have seen major improvements.
There is this constant pet peeve of mine with the Google Calendar App on Android where if you would like to delete an appointment, you can't do it anywhere else (week, month, day, etc) except in the appointment itself. Prior to Lollipop, one had to go into the appointment itself -> hit "edit" -> scroll all the way down to the bottom of the appointment details -> click giant delete button which filled the whole bottom bit.
Lollipop is slightly better where you still have to click on the appointment itself but again, there are no obvious buttons except edit and the only way to delete it is to click on "menu" -> select delete.
I tried reporting it and like any other support query that goes to google, it just goes into a giant black hole (ok, i exaggerate much.. more like 7 in 10 actually).
You mean you search past events via search box. Never did that. I love great search boxes, but for some reason I always did that manually in Calendar without even thinking about it.
This is one of those things that only the GooglePlex bubble can come up with.
As a busy person (my wife and I both work, we have a child, and hard time constraints due to teaching obligations, etc.), free time is exactly what I want to schedule as little as possible. I want to spontaneously decide to do a hike with my family, or when my daughter wants to play, I want to be there. There's enough obligations already, free time should be spontaneous and available to family.
It is also a bit annoying that they focus on these features without solving real problems first. Someone already mentioned search, which is (ironically) indeed quite bad. Also, appointment suggestions based on e-mails has very low recall. I especially noticed this since I switched back to Mail.app, which picks up a lot more dates in e-mails.
>This is one of those things that only the GooglePlex bubble can come up with.
Actually they acquired the company that came up with it.
The Timeful team has built an impressive system that helps you organize your life by understanding your schedule, habits and needs.
You can tell Timeful you want to exercise three times a week or that you need to call the bank by next Tuesday, and their system will make sure you get it done based on an understanding of both your schedule and your priorities.
Good point. I was originally going to say 'the SF tech bubble', but I do not want to offend too many people ;).
I still think the point stands, between missing features, adding questionable features, and failed April 1 jokes, I sometimes wonder how much 'market research' there is.
As someone who is self-employed, works from home, and actually likes their job - scheduling free time is really important for me. If I don't, my work and my side projects creep into everything. I also thought this practice was ridiculous but then I started doing it and it's really improved my work/life separation.
If it works as well as the reminders in Google Now, I'd rather avoid it.
I spent about five minutes saying "Remind me to buy paper towels"[0], Google Now suggested it should remind me the next time I'm near a grocery store. I wasn't reminded ever again and the reminder didn't show up anywhere in Google Now because it had no date or time associated with it. I actually only found the reminder when it showed up on Google Calendar in my desktop browser -- this was about two months in.
I'll definitely try that out, though it is in conflict with the GTD method I'm currently practicing. In GTD, only things that HAVE to be done on a certain day or time, go in the calendar. Because else you will be constantly re-scheduling and reprioritizing.
If Google gets it right though, and your goals are perfectly prioritized, AND the algorithm makes use of contexts (e.g. I cannot fulfill goal "spend time with family" when I'm not home), then this might actually work for me. Not sure though whether I want a machine telling me what to do right now :)
I can't find a good reference for it right now, but GTD is starting to show its age and the latest research/consensus in productivity circles now seems to be "if you never commit to a time for doing it (i.e. put it in your calendar), it ain't gonna happen"
For me, the only real consensus is that there isn't one todo methodology that fits every personality type in every job type for every task type at all times.
Anyone suggesting there is, probably has a book for sale.
For me, this would not work. I have 200 open mini tasks that are infeasible to put into a calendar. Most people actually have that many or more todos, they just don't capture and consequently forget them.
Why does it take an acquihire for google to add meaningful new features to a product that hasn't changed substantially in years?
Also, the implementation of the "appointments" feature that they just rolled out in google calendar is broken; it doesn't respect existing events in the same calendar, which is just half assed.
Also, I wish they would make adding invites to your calendar consistently work before making some other products. If your a calendar app, you need to work well at being a damn calendar, and then do other stuff.
The updated Google Calender version doesn't seem to be in the Play Store yet - version 5.3.8-117343094 updated 20160317 doesn't have the Goals feature (20160413 13:30 CET). Does anyone have access and if so how?
The play store webpage in the browser says something else (Updated: April 6, 2016 Current Version: Varies with device), but if I install that one remotely through the web, it ends up being the same version. Perhaps it's because I'm still running Android 5
I'm in Europe as well, perhaps the stores are different. I know this is the case with Amazon, iTunes and Playstation. Well I'm not going to go through all the trouble of VPN'ing into the US to check for this new version. It might come to us eventually.
I wonder how intelligent it is, since I do not feed that much data to Google Calendar, just the things I know I'm going to forget. Almost all of those empty hours in my Calendar are actually busy.
Garbage in, garbage out. There's other people out there that put in too much data (can't remember the link, but a guy put in literally _everything_, including nutrient consumption)
Any machine learning experts here? How is the problem of finding empty slots in your calendar formulated as an ML problem? This is an honest question to learn.
Not an expert. My guess is that it is about ranking available slots. Like given a wealth of available times for you to do X task, what makes some block X more "optimal" than block Y?
Also there's some constraint satisfaction. You probably don't want to do your thing twice in one day. You probably don't want to do it during established office hours. Maybe you want your framework to learn what office hours are (to implicitly support people without that office lifestyle). And you want to aim for having something be done N times a week.
Also, you can use the times that tasks are actually completed as feedback into new suggestions. I.e. if historically you've committed to your hobby every Tuesday night, then we should be that you will continue to do that, ergo, keep scheduling for Tuesday night. Similarly, Defer actions for the same times of day could be taken as an anti-signal (i.e. office hours).
Do we know yet if there will be a way to actually "log" those goals? The scheduling is great but it's no guarantee I'll get off my butt. On Timeful I can get my goals scheduled in, log them, and see how many days in the week I actually did something rather than just scheduled it. Would be nice to have.
> a new feature called Goals that uses machine learning to help you figure out when you have time to pencil in stuff like spending time with your family or exercise.
Spending time with your family is a goal/something you need help finding the time for?
What the fuck Google? How busy do you think the average person is?
To clarify, I was assuming family meant your wife/kids, or whoever you are living with. If you live alone and you don't always find the time to go visit your parents etc. then I can understand how this would be useful.
I can't help but wonder what will come out of all of these attempts to feed million's people's data (they'll spy on everyone, but that seems inevitable in this age) to some kind of machine learning contraption.
I have strong feeling that if there comes a revolution in AI, google will be leading it with their unprecedented access to human behavior.
In that perspective, feeding data to google seems more profitable for us as humans than feeding it to some state's agency furthering their own goals. Not that I'm advising for enabling every user-tracking option out there, but still.
I use Google Calendar heavily, averaging ~10 entries per day for the last 5+ years, and then some entries per day all the way back to when it was launched.
I can put information in easily enough, and with a few IFTTT recipes I'm able to treat Google Calendar not just as a schedule for upcoming events, appointments and reminders, but as a historical log of everything I've done. It is a time based database of my life... a diary.
I've automated my diary taking into Google Calendar. The what, where and when of everything ends up in one of 12 calendars (each calendar is effectively a label to categorise a whole group of events that have occurred).
And it's brilliant.
Except for the search.
It's really difficult to get the information back out. If I search for something I know that has happened, or has happened frequently, Google will delightfully tell me that I have matched 200 results, and then show me a list of 9 or 10 of them, with no way to paginate the remainder or search the old ones (it only finds upcoming, not past).
Search is broken on Google Calendar, to the point of being almost totally useless.
Far better to rely on time as a search dimension and jump around dates until one manually finds whatever you were looking for. It's that broken.
Compare to search on a product that has some love: Google Photos. Where now the miraculous occurs, I can search things like "Felicity skiing" and what will return are photos of my wife skiing, and an option to look at all other photos on those days. A simple search and all the results you want, and a single click to expand to view it in the wider context that makes sense.
Google Calendar really needs a decent search. It feels far too much like writing to /dev/null at the moment. Your information went in there, but the chances of you finding it when you wish to reference it are pretty non-existent.