Hi HN , my partner and I were looking for easier answers to our weekend planning ritual, such as:
- When is our next free weekend?
- What weekend activities have we got planned?
- How busy/available are we to travel / host?
Especially at the start of each year, when we're trying to plan flights and/or commit to hosting friends & family visits, I struggled to find a usable overview of multiple months that wasn't cluttered with weekdays. Our social events are overwhelmingly centered around weekends and we wanted a view of the year ahead that reflected that.
How about just a line of 52 boxes, one per weekend ahead, shaded differently whether it was free or maybe busy or definitely busy? That was the initial sketch on a napkin that lead to a first proof of concept script that I ran locally.
Now, it's a webapp* that reads from our calendars (Google only for now, sorry) to visually summarise weekends - all with readonly access. I've since added some calendar-write features from there ("pro" version, completely free) as our lives become busier with a dog, and parenthood more recently. Features like event templates, summarising events by hashtags, flagging draft/unconfirmed events etc.
We've been using it to scratch our own planning itches for some years now already, and I'm sharing here now in case it can be useful for others. Even better if you have any feedback.
What / how have you hacked to get clearer and direct insights into your time?
I think time management and calendars have been lacking a UX overhaul for a long long time so it's a space I'm passionate about tinkering within.
*stack is Nuxt 3, backed by Supabase, hosted on Cloudflare Pages.
There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.