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Sketchy Calendar

inkandswitch.com

156 pointssurprisetalk46 comments

Self-plug: I created 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!

Cool, this is really lovely stuff! Almost makes me want to get a ReMarkable just to try it out :)

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 .

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#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.

If it could be run via cli I would do something similar to what Remarcal does (but more flexible, not being closed):

  - Check if there are changes on the live calendar (preferably with the ETag header)
  - If there are changes, download an updated iCal file
  - Launch the calendar generator using the updated iCal file to update the PDF
  - Sync the PDF to the eInk reader of choice

Nice, TIL! I knew ReMarkable stored the written notes in a special file, but it sounded a bit hacky, so I did not want to touch that. Good to see someone managed to make it work! I'll have to look into it, thanks!

Edit: tracking here: https://github.com/klimeryk/recalendar.js/issues/23#issuecom...

Yeah, you can update the PDF as you will, as the scribbles are saved in a parallel file. You can't, of course, change the number or location of the pages. It won't break, but the written notes will appear in the wrong page.

And it seems like the Supernote does it the same way, I haven't had time for testing.

I'll subscribe myself to the issue and say hi :)

Thanks for sharing. I may give this a try with the "Notability" application for iOS.

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.

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/

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.

I solved it with different colored calendars in g-cal. Monthly => Rough => Detail => Actual.

Monthly is usually dragging a bunch of "all-day" events across multiple weeks. "school ends", "date night?" (across Fri->Sun), "vacation", "vacation pack", etc.

Rough is kindof planning out the upcoming week or two. I'll drag stuff across Saturday afternoon like "go to park?", and "buy paper towels from Sam's?" in the morning.

Detail is "15-min accuracy" of committed things. Doctor's appointments, birthday party invites, haircuts, or anything that is really "controlling" where I need to be or what I need to be doing at that point in time.

The "actual" calendar is for when I want to reconcile what actually happened vs what I'd planned to happen.

If I'm super "on it" with my detail calendar, maybe I didn't do "clean office" because in actuality I was doing "make dinner", "clean kitchen", and "watch movie with kids".

And integrating with work, sometimes I'll block a section (hour) in "actual" called "Work P1". That's supposed to be "the next item in the todo list", but it is sometimes really helpful to cross-check with "actual" and realize I was really "troubleshooting bug", or "helping coworker on xyz" or "continuing design discussion".

The "narrowing" and "accuracy" is helpful to learn how to do, and the big chunky things like "put fertilizer" and "in-laws visiting" help to make sure I don't schedule too much "detail" in times that already have a lot of external complexity.

I've got a slightly different philosophy.

A calendar is for storing commitments, and a specific date/time is part of that commitment.

I consider a 'to do list' a 'to schedule list', they are potential commitments.

From my perspective, a thing is either a commitment (on the calendar) or not (essentially in a backlog).

My ideal agenda has certain things showing up wayyy before they actually happen, like anything that I need to buy gifts for. However, I don’t want to see “take out the trash bins” until day-of (maybe unless I’m going to be out of town the day the bins go out! Maybe I should see that the day before I leave.)

All of these things are trivial in Remind, a tool from yesteryear that still pretty much works.

I don’t really use remind anymore though, partly because it’s terminal-centric and sometimes there are days when I... when I don’t look at a terminal at all. There, I said it.

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/

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 :$

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!

Maybe Sciral Consistency?

That was it, yes! Thank you!

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/

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/...

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-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).

> 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-out...

You can events as tentative in Google Calendar by responding with "Maybe".

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.

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.

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

> 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.

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

They've made a prototype for that: https://www.inkandswitch.com/embark/ Sadly not released.

Someone released a similar trip-planning webapp: https://waypoint.jakelazaroff.com/

Blog post: https://jakelazaroff.com/words/a-local-first-case-study/

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/

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.

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)

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.

How does it work?

Your best bet is the pocketmod site: 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.

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.

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.

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.

And also the ability to share the calendar.

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

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/

[1] https://flexibits.com/fantastical

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.

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

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

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...

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