Calendars are the future of quickly visually parsing any reasonably sized set of data with timestamp values.

Before you read:

This is a rambling article discussing

• a proposed product

• a personal anecdote of why I thought of said product

• delirium about today’s state of data collection

• a conclusion of the calendar as a UI & data structuring tool.

Below, a little skit…

Today, I am going to introduce 3 products.

A diary, a personal search engine, and a calendar.
A diary. A personal search engine. Are you getting it?

These are not 3 separate electron apps. (ha ha)

(If you do not recognize the pattern here, you ~live under a rock~ aren’t obsessed with Steve Jobs and Apple. Here’s some context.)

Intro

I believe the calendar is a flexible enough medium to do more than hold doctors appointments and maintain a stranglehold on your entire work life.

Nearly everything in our (digitally recordable) lives has a timestamp attached - when it was created, when it was changed, and when it’s supposed to happen. However, the calendar, a tool that loves (and needs) timestamps has been this immensely powerful tool hampered by various factors that tend to relegate it to the “I shall schedule this meeting from 3:00pm to 3:15pm” machine. It stops it from growing into something more.

I am alluding to the conclusion that everything can live in the calendar.

A calendar diary?

I explored using my calendar as a diary, dragging blocks for previous days denoting “went to makerspace” or “had lunch with a friend”. That way, going back in my calendar would have some purpose. Just as you can schedule something a year in advance, why shouldn’t I be able to go a year back and rediscover what I was doing that day, or search when I last went to my favorite restaurant?

On reflection, this has been “solved” before - Google offers something called Location History, and for the time period in which I owned an Android phone, I am quickly able to check where I was on any given day, which often jogged the memory enough to remember what was going on. Location History used Google Maps as the primary UI, and a datepicker let you view a day at a time. Google Photos & Snapchat include features inside their app where a world map with a heatmap of their photos lets you view the data structured geographically. Heck, this was a feature on a Windows 8 phone from Nokia that I picked up on Facebook Marketplace. Gluing together metadata from photos & your phone’s location history already shows plenty of potential, but one can argue that they’re not a solution because it’s been made by a big company. Hence, my DIY attempt at something similar.

This diary experiment lasted a few months, with each week recording less and less precisely the events of the day as I grew tired of marking it all down. Mobile calendar apps like Apple’s and Google’s do not have an easy way of dragging to create arbitrarily sized events in the calendar - the start time is easy, but to define the end, you have to fiddle with the revolving time picker - it’s just a few too many taps. However, an optimized UI is only one hurdle in this path of reinvigorating the humble calendar. Many added events can be automated.

Continued deliberation

Of course, “can” does not necessarily mean “should”. It is easy to overwhelm a calendar with “went to the bathroom” and “sharpened my pencil”, and drill down so precisely that even the Germans would call it senseless. I do not need to give “smart toilets” any more reason to exist. But, given the chance, the user interface that the calendar provides to quickly filter and view different “calendars” (a bad term for groups of events, in my opinion) and view data in a simplified grid that has been standardized for hundreds of years (and now very familiar and mature) has a lot of potential to grow, at least in terms of the data generally recorded on them.

This path of calendar growth is something I’m going to call the mega calendar.

The Mega Calendar

One company that’s really tried at getting this done is Amie. From integrations with Spotify & Apple Health, they are following a similar mindset - that the data already collected could be viewed in a novel form, and that new patterns or conclusions could be drawn from this.

And I’m not the only individual looking into this concept, Julian wrote a really nice post on a very similar topic.

Side note: The article is marked “new” on his webpage but it’s been a year and a half (as of Dec. 2024) !

There has been swirlings of calendars being better for a long time now, I’m sure there are dozens of other personal musings about the possibilities

Stuff like this tweet starts to show more of my vision.

But, I’ll wrap this up with a disappointing conclusion:

Doing all of this means that you’re just tracking all this stuff digitally.
Do you want everything tracked digitally?

Does every toilet flush, toothbrush use, trip to the grocery store, or hour spent on hold need to be written down? Forget that - what about the stuff that’s already tracked? Should it all be accessible in one singular place, even if it makes it easier for you to review?

In this new light, such a product sounds awfully dystopian. A calendar that clearly displays that it has known your every move?

This opens a whole can of worms about what we can do about the data that’s already being recorded on us.

Sometimes such surveillance can be funny, like someone’s project that turned every NYC traffic camera into a “photo booth”, but when you realize just how powerful a collection of various sources of data on yourself can be when combined, you might wish you never knew you could mix them all together.

So I don’t know how to proceed on making such a mega calendar.

The contrarian appears

Once, I felt naked when I wasn’t wearing a smart watch or didn’t have my phone in my pocket.

Now, when I put on a manual-wind or automatic watch (the ones with the gears in them), it can feel like a breath of fresh air. That is, when the metal bracelet isn’t picking at my arm hair.

Spotify shares your listening with anyone who follows you your friends, and songs disappear all the time because a license deal expired.

An iPod will play music until its spinning hard drive seizes.

Maybe the future of the mega calendar is bright. As bright as those cursed LED headlights.

The not-mega calendar

So, where else can the calendar grow? It’s clear that a mega calendar is just a front for greedy data collection, but that doesn’t mean that the calendar being the framework for a UI is a bad idea.

Look at BeReal. Each day is marked not by events, but by a photograph.

There’s also Retro, which pushes this concept to grouping your photos by week (which lets you ease off on days that nothing’s happening, and post lots of stuff for the busy days of the week). Retro is actually so intriguing that Google shamelessly ripped it off for Google Photos in a beta tested feature.

And, if you really think about it, the “stories” feature that Snapchat pioneered (and Instagram, then Facebook copied) is in essence, a daily “to-do” list of things to take a look at. One could argue that this is a sliding 24 hour slice of a daily calendar view, just transformed into a horizontally scrolling list with neat images and a multicolored ring to entice you to view the contents.

The calendar’s opportunity is to be integrated into dashboards, photo galleries, friend group chats, and countless other products as a fundamental UI building block. By understanding how to put together a daily summary, how to query through a range of dates, and how to structure data so that visualizations of arbitrary scale become simple, this ensures a smarter design and maintenance of date records and their data structures. A platform that provides useful summaries for grouped data, and a way to quickly view trends over time in an easy-to-understand interface is one that is forward thinking, and too often reserved for enterprise software.

A final personal tidbit

By implementing a calendar in my own database project, SXCTrack, I learned of a fatal flaw in my own data structure - I didn’t account for a cross country meet to be something that lasted for more than a day. Even with this still being a weakness of the data structure I designed for my copy of this data, the calendar still allows someone to very quickly see if any recent meets have occurred, and I was able to make a great visualization of my high school’s running team’s trends over the course of over 40 years. You’ll never learn if you don’t try.

Conclusion

Mega calendar bad. Calendar good. Try to incorporate one into your next project. See how it goes!