Calendar Integration

Features
21

Things 3 workflow is based on "timeline’ perspective.

Today is Focus(Priorities) list. It lists following tasks - priority tasks, tasks scheduled for today, due today and calendar events.

Upcoming lists scheduled tasks, tasks assigned future due date and calendar events

Anytime lists tasks having no date assigned (no start date and no due date)

So if we compare everdo & Things 3 workflows,

Today = Focus (+Calendar events)
Upcoming = Scheduled tasks + tasks with future due date (+Calendar events)
Anytime = Next - (tasks with due date)

Please refer to attachments.

What I am trying to convey is that if we can see tasks due for the day & events scheduled for the day in one list, it will be very useful for daily review. Another good example is Microsoft outlook.

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1 Like
22

Apologies if this is the wrong location or if it has been mentioned before, but something I’d really use is a quick add feature with a default reminder time. 2Do has this mechanism and it’s great for quickly getting something ‘remembered’ without it going into the ever deepening abyss of todos.

The experience: Me, walking to car: 'ooh I must remember to book a dentist appointment tomorrow. (I tell myself this each evening after the dentist has closed, but get busy the next day and forget again). Me: grab phone, tap Everdo widget, quickly type (or ooh gasp!: dictate) ‘call dentist’. As I’ve already configured the widget to add a Scheduled item that will remind me at 10am the following business day to do this, the next day I get a reminder and actually do it. Thanks Everdo!

I do appreciate that this would likely have to be post calendar integration.
In the desktop app it could be context aware and likely only add the reminder date and time when the Scheduled action is selected, on mobile it could be done via widget configuration: add widget, in widget settings choose default action, if action is ‘Scheduled’ show default reminder time. Added bonus: multiple widgets for multiple quick adds. Double bonus for voice add.
Thanks for the wonderful app.

23

It seems to me like in this case just using Inbox would work. Whenever you come up with stuff, you just add it to Inbox. There are no required field in Everdo, so you just type “call dentist”, save and forget about it. At some point when you have time, you’ll review your Inbox and do something about everything contained in there. Wouldn’t that work?

24

Hi Andrei, for me at least, the big selling point is that the item ‘comes to me’ as it is, rather than me needing to go looking for it. Being able to set a time (say 9:30am) is not so much about the event needing to be done at that particular time, but rather me being in a situation where that item is actionable, as in, the dental business has opened, and I’m able to call them. Unfortunately, if one gets busy with other tasks, ‘save and forget about it’ as you aptly put it, is exactly what happens :).
I’d like my relationship with Everdo to be a two way street, rather than me needing to go to it all the time. I was surprised by how useful this functionality is in 2Do, and how often I reached for it. Thanks for listening.

25

Hi.

In my opinion, an agenda app and a todo app are different tools created for handling different items.

Before starting with integrations, I think that the best would be to focus first on improving Everdo
and making it really become the best GTD app by itself.

3 Likes
26

Just my personal note, which I think is related. I have a context/tag called @dull_things and it contains actions I don’t really want to do, but which need to be done and don’t require much planning. Like scheduling a dentist appointment. I have a time slot in my calendar when I review this context and complete these actions.
I guess this is how GTD should work in general - you identify the context when the action is relevant and the action will show up once you are in the right context.

2 Likes
27

Is it possible to integrate calendar without google / office365 ?

28

I would agree that sending tasks to a calendar is sub-optimal, as you state.

That said, I believe the intent is to acknowledge that every task that is ever completed is done in time, thus in reality happens somewhere on the calendar. I think this last step of placing a task on the calendar, with an approximate duration, is the ultimate and final forcing function to make us acknowledge the ultimate truth of GTD, and that is that you can accomplish anything you want, just not everything you want.

2 Likes
29

Any news? I’ll be glad to have just implemented calendar even without Google calendar of Microsoft calendar sync (this feature can wait really). Also I wanna have discrete Today tab or as part of Calendar view. Seems it’s not quite hard to implement it too. Focus tab is good, but not complete for time- and actions (things) management. Because calendar/Today brings clear look to my plans and 2do-items, extended with GTD way.

2 Likes
30

We don’t need calendar integration. We need timed reminders to be built into the tasks and to get notifications from the app.

The only reason you have to spend time setting up your focus list into your calendar app is because Everdo doesn’t have timed reminders and notifications.

Timed reminders in Todoist allowed me to see what I needed to do at the exact time I needed to do it.

If I have to schedule all my focused tasks into a calendar then Everdo becomes useless to even open it.
I can just open my calendar . Why take the extra step?

I use my calendar for blocking routines.

Look. You are competing with features that other services are offering.

If you get calendar integration working in such a way that provides timed reminders and notifications that can be managed DIRECTLY WITHIN Everdo,
Good on you.

How would that even work though?

If that is the solution then, I guess it’s a good one.

I’d rather have that then what we’ve got now with zero notifications or due times.

1 Like
31

First of all, note that many users do use a calendar already, and work by the calendar regardless of whether a certain todo app has integration with it or not. This is not something I just came up with and started pushing on everybody :slight_smile:

How does that work?

2 Likes
32

Unfortunately I don’t have a better example than this since I’ve let my Todoist lists go to rot after switching to Everdo.

But here is a video.

I had an amazing setup. All of my reviews/projects came to me at the time I needed and the tasks inside of them were all scheduled for the proper TIME when I could get to them.

For me, a project is over due if it is past its TIME, not date. If you cannot schedule the times then you have to keep them all in your head or double all of that data in another system that can handle time.

Todoist and Ticktick and Wunderlist and several others also have this functionality.

33

I also have my phone setup so that it reads my notifications to me.

When I’m out and about it tells me exactly what I need to do when I need to do it. Saved me so many times.

I can’t keep all that stuff in my head. I got other things to think about.

34

In Omnifocus you have the Forecast view, which is a little bit calendar like. It shows your items due and/or deferred for a specific date and can pull in data from one or more calendars so you can see the two pieces of information together.

The Forecast view, which shows the list of upcoming tasks sorted by dates, would be amazing to have. Having the calendar data integrated into that view would be extremely useful.

Example: https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fcolterreed.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2014%2F04%2FOmniFocus-2-ships-in-June.png&f=1&nofb=1

35

Hi,

I’d like to refresh this post and mention my own use case (which may or may not apply to any of you).
I need my scheduled tasks, tasks with due dates et cetera date-related go to CalDAV provider of my choice - just because dates belong to the calendar, and it’s a double job, to first include the date into everdo task, and then also add the same info into the calendar.

Good example of what I need is birthday list sync - I’d like to have everdo as a source of truth, but I also like to have notifications/reminders. I prefer not to have notifications outside the calendar program of my choice because it’s better to have a single source of notifications.

Technology-wise, I only need one-way sync, when everdo is posting tasks into the calendar (calendar entry header == everdo task name, contents are not required). There’s no need to copy anything back from calendar (although it might be beneficial to read something from CalDAV to check if data is there already - not sure how different people would implement it).

Thank you as always for a great product.

1 Like
36

For me, calendars and calendar integration are principally about visualisation. I sometimes find it hard to grok my scheduled activities and choose appropriate next actions without being able to see a calendar view of what’s coming up.

A simple example is an event like people’s birthdays or meetings that require some preparation in the days before. In reality, these are two different actions - e.g., “Start looking for a present”, and “Attend the birthday of X” - but it’s pretty clumsy to determine this way ahead of time.

At the moment, my workaround is to set due dates some time before the scheduled date so that the event will appear at the appropriate time for preparation - but this system breaks on repeated tasks, and it has further weaknesses in that it doesn’t necessarily make me aware of other future obligations that I haven’t set up in this way. It’s doable, but a bit onerous, especially in things like work meetings where you’re rapidly scheduling multiple actions for the near future.

A calendar view makes is possible to intelligently determine appropriate next actions on-the-fly, by allowing you to visualise the future context. Integration is a step that makes this even easier by automatically bringing in actions from other contexts.

37

:exploding_head:

For my part, I think of one simple thing. Use planning dates and due dates to set the time limits of a work event which is a task (block). These time blocks of work could be displayed in a calendar and exported as .ics/ical

38

One really nice application of a calendar in a more-or-less GTD setup is that used by Amplenote. Within Amplenote, brain-dump thoughts or Jots are initially captured in one view, to be clarified into Notes in another view. Notes support the use of Markdown bullet-pointed tasks. All bullet-pointed Tasks are then aggregated in the Tasks view, where they can be prioritised, scheduled, tagged etc. The next view is Calendar, where there is a side-panel containing all unscheduled tasks (the view of which can be filtered according to tag) and these can be quickly drag & dropped into the calendar in the name of time-blocking. Any uncompleted tasks go back into the Tasks list.

I think it works exceptionally well, essentially facilitating the typically pen & paper time-blocking process within the app.

Here’s a short Youtube video on the planning process available: How I Plan a Productive Week in Under 10 Minutes with Amplenote - YouTube

39

Hello, Andrei, List,

Thank you for the great work, and please do keep it up.

I’m new to Everdo, and very much impressed by the project. It works on most platforms we use, and provides secure sync. That is the main feature set for us.

A calendar view would be nice, but clearly users have many, many different ideas for both GTD and calendar sync. A calendar view might be useful, and it could be something like the existing “Scheduled” view (perhaps with a key combo option for list, month, week?). That might be an easier first step than syncing with different services. OneCalendar does this very well, but is limited in platforms supported, and is not a GTD or planning service.

If you did move to a “plug in” type of API for calendars and sync features, I would be willing to pay for that like we currently pay for secure sync. This is assuming a reasonable fee and that Everdo would keep its current features.

Other GTD apps and services do try to include calendar integration, but they don’t work on as many platforms as Everdo. Going way back to paper planners, FiloFax, Covey, Franklin and GTD all had some kind of calendar, but only Franklin seems to have made a digital version for their PDA (electronic planner), and that was a long time ago.

Calendars in GTD (like Covey and Franklin) had a different premise than Google and Microsoft, which seem to work better for organizational coordination. For personal productivity, the old paper GTD (and Covey and Franklin) worked very well with the calendar as part of that purpose.

Calendar integration with the apple-google-micro-plex, et. al. would be great, so please do if you have the time, energy and money to do it. But I would settle for a calendar view (list, day, week, month) within the current Everdo apps. If it keeps the current security with secure sync, I would definitely use it. My guess is that most of your users would be happy to sync with google and microsoft with less security (or whatever privacy and security tech companies claim to have).

Your current set up is good in my opinion. It is somewhere between “tin foil hat” and “I love big tech brother”. Good enough for me.