(This is an opinion piece)
Calendars are quite a big topic for me. For very long time I avoided to use CalDAV calendars. I didn’t have no special reason, like something that I explicitely dislike in CalDAV or similar. It happened, because… well… I always wondered why so many people combine calendars with eMail and CalDAV seemed to me like it’s always around eMail. I know this is not true, but…
However… quite early I stumbled upon an awesome tool called remind by Diana Skoll and I really liked it. I still like it. I think it is not so easy to learn that tool and I never dived very deep. Remind is really super, but it’s a tool that has learning curve. Not problematic at all. The point is that I sometimes don’t use it for a while and then I forget a lot of things. And if I want to create an event then I have to read first a lot to get back into the topic and then I’m again in the situation that I think
“Yes, I should really sit down and learn this, because it is such an awesome tool and I should really integrate it into my everyday life.”
…but for some reason this doesn’t happen since many years.
In my mind task management is closer to calendars than eMail and so I tried many other tools that are quite popular, but from the beginning I see that none of the existing solutions meet my needs. A few months ago I started using CalDAV calendars and also there the situation is the same: tools don’t meet my needs. But I learned that I really like to synchronize calendars and having them with me on my mobile phone. This is really helpful.
To give an example why I’m so frustrated about calendaring tools: There’s a group that I’m member of and we meet every monday. We’re still discovering how to really organize our meetings. We have two kinds of meetings: plenums and tinker meetings. For a while we had simply every two weeks plenum and every two weeks tinker meeting. In the calendaring tool that I currently use this is easy. But recently the situation changed to: every first monday of a month plenum and the the other mondays tinker meeting. This first monday thing is easy in my tool, but the other is not, because I have “every second”, “every third”, “every fourth” and sometimes “every fith”. From logical viewpoint I would say this is “every monday that’s not the first in a month”, but guess what: this functionality does not exist. Of course not. Why not? Good question my dear readers :-) My “solution” was to generate an entry for every monday that’s a tinker meeting so that I have two entries for the first monday of a month when we have plenum. Ugly, if you ask me. And something that I hear people often say when we discuss this is and similar problems:
“Well… most people don’t use such advanced features like those you wish to have.”
To be honest: I don’t think that this is true. First: I don’t think that my wishes describe features that are that advanced. Second: I think that most people simply deal with the existing tools. I think many many people are also not satisfied, but don’t give feedback.
Recently I started to code an own solution. My progress is very slow because I’m not really a coder - so this project is also something that I use to learn programming as well. Maybe I can figure out why all the tools out there are so inflexible. All except remind of course :-)
I hope that I’ll continue my work with my calendar project and that it will bring interesting results.