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Google Calendar now uses machine learning to help you accomplish your goals

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Re: Google Calendar now uses machine learning to help you accomplish your goals

#51

Post by zirni »

buro9 wrote: post #14

I wish they'd just fix search. 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 t…

Hi buro9,

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.

If you're interested check it out https://www.time-mentor.com/ Thanks :-)

Re: Google Calendar now uses machine learning to help you accomplish your goals

#52

Post by manmal »

renaudg wrote: post #15
manmal wrote: post #10

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 fam…

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, 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.

Re: Google Calendar now uses machine learning to help you accomplish your goals

#53

Post by [deleted] »

renaudg wrote: post #15
manmal wrote: post #10

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 fam…

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"

[deleted]

Re: Google Calendar now uses machine learning to help you accomplish your goals

#54

Post by wjoe »

afarrell wrote: post #32
id122015 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quote "It is a time based database of my life" 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…

> Why don't you create your own local "Google Calendar"? 1) Because it would take months. 2) Because it would probably be hard to make it integrate with other things like Calendly.

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.

Re: Google Calendar now uses machine learning to help you accomplish your goals

#55

Post by wjoe »

qznc wrote: post #38
id122015 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quote "It is a time based database of my life" 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…

Radicale: https://apps.sandstorm.io/app/8kr4rvyrggvzfvc160htzdt4u5rfvj... Unfortunately, it does not work well enough. So I have not switched yet. It is close for me, so I keep an eye on it.

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.

[1] http://baikal-server.com/

Re: Google Calendar now uses machine learning to help you accomplish your goals

#56

Post by VLM »

id122015 wrote: post #31
buro9 wrote: post #14

I wish they'd just fix search. 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 t…

Quote "It is a time based database of my life" 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…

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.

Re: Google Calendar now uses machine learning to help you accomplish your goals

#57

Post by jvolkman »

pluma wrote: post #21

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 Googl…

Works for me. The location-based reminder shows as "upcoming" in Now's reminder list.

Re: Google Calendar now uses machine learning to help you accomplish your goals

#58

Post by b0t »

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.
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