Hi all,
I've always enjoyed creating calendar visualizations, and today's post is about rethinking daily agendas to suit my view of the world. (I'm not rethinking the political agenda today, just my daily agenda, but maybe we could use both!) Really this boils down to taking a look at an agenda view vs. a calendar view, and finding the best of each. I think the answer is a multi-part agenda, which I built for merini.io, but read on!
First, lets take a look at a basic calendar view. It's pretty clear, visually, that the morning is busy, then there's a large gap in the afternoon, and finally, the gym and a date in the evening. I like this view, but it also takes up a lot of space on a screen or a printed page. I don't want to call the white space wasted, but let's take a look at an Agenda View next, and see how much more compact it is.
The Agenda View, (Google Calendar actually calls it Schedule View), is short, tidy, and neat. It shows the same information, in far less space. The downside, is that mentally, it's on the user to "fill in the gaps" and figure out where there's free time.
Adapting Both to my World View
Here's my take, and how I bend things to my world view. See, I prefer to think about my day in blocks of time, i.e. what am I doing this morning, what's on for the afternoon, and what's going on this evening?
As a food centric person, this generally corresponds to "before lunch", "after lunch", and "now I've picked up the kids and need to get dinner together." It suits my mental model. Also, this is very much a nod to Paul Graham's Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule, and thinking in chunks of working blocks.
So I've taken the agenda view, and broken it up into a morning agenda, afternoon agenda, and evening agenda. It's more space efficient than a full calendar, but also shows at a glance, when things happen. And yes, there's still a little mental juggling to fill in where you have free gaps, but generally, if you have more than 2 or 3 calendar events in a block, it's going to be hard to fit things in and get things done, anyway. I also like being able to schedule "to-do" items on the agenda, without needing to be so specific as to say "I will take the car to the dealership at 8:37am, immediately after I have finished kid dropoff." I just know that I'll need to drive there and then figure out how I'll get home, which will blow up my morning.
Anyway, one of the fun things about vibe-coding and building merini.io, is that it's easier than ever to just build these things and explore ideas. I've been using the multi-part agenda for the last few weeks and enjoying it, so the feature is now public.
best regards,
Sam Feller
aka THE Awkward Engineer