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Show HN: I built presently.live for better weekend planning and insights

presently.live

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Show HN: I built presently.live for better weekend planning and insights

#1
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.

Show HN: I built presently.live for better weekend planning and insights
presently.live

Re: Show HN: I built presently.live for better weekend planning and insights

#3

In the old HN fashion: - congrats for writing and publishing this useful looking tool! - why are there no screenshots or preview how this will look like before I give access to my calendar

Thanks for the feedback! - preview screenshot added just now. It's funny how easy it is to miss those simple things despite having looked at it for so long.

Re: Show HN: I built presently.live for better weekend planning and insights

#4

In the old HN fashion: - congrats for writing and publishing this useful looking tool! - why are there no screenshots or preview how this will look like before I give access to my calendar

Thanks for the feedback! - preview screenshot added just now. It's funny how easy it is to miss those simple things despite having looked at it for so long.

I still don't quite get it. I can scroll my mouse on Google Calendar looking at the Saturday and Sunday columns. 12 clicks of my scroll wheel and I've seen my year of weekends. In your screenshot, I scroll left-to-right and Sat/Sun are combined, but I am not understanding the benefit of that.

Re: Show HN: I built presently.live for better weekend planning and insights

#7
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the feedback! - preview screenshot added just now. It's funny how easy it is to miss those simple things despite having looked at it for so long.

I still don't quite get it. I can scroll my mouse on Google Calendar looking at the Saturday and Sunday columns. 12 clicks of my scroll wheel and I've seen my year of weekends. In your screenshot, I scroll left-to-right and Sat/Sun are combined, but I am not understanding the benefit of that.

The screenshot is just a small snippet, zoomed in for clarity (and to avoid sharing PII from my actual calendar) but I actually see about 5 months ahead at a time with zero clicks/scrolling on my standard browser.

Also I find the horizontal timeline view helps to spot clusters of too-much-going-on more intuitively than the typical wrapped view of a calendar block.

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