Organisation App

Idea

My partner and I decided to do a bingo board of yearly goals. These tasks are long term, require consistency and need tracking. No app existed which wasnt expensive and bad. So made my own and included some interesting scheduling logic for tasks also embedded into the google calendar API. (so I dont need to worry about database costs etc.)

Key Features

• Long term and running tasks, creates a calendar entry with json stored in it as definitions. These are on their own calendar group (which can be toggled off on the front end for the user). Then in order to keep track of when and where tasks / habits are logged, a calednar entry is created for each day.
• Different task types; supports X amount of time, X times, Quitting (eg. a streak of days where the task isnt done), for daily, weekly, monthly, yearly and Long term (forever).
• Task creation: This is a form of a reminder system for me. Often I use my calendar to remind me of things I need to do, however often tasks pass and I lose track. So with some bespoke logic we have a completed calendar, a todo calendar and a backlog calendar. Meaning I can manage scehduling and if something todo doesnt get ticked off (and is in the past), I can return it for re-scheduling.
• Scheduling logic: Scheduling is hard, especially when either lots of tasks or very few tasks. We have a couple of criteria to take into mind.

Earliest possible Schedule Date: DD/MM/YYYY Availability: Hours of the day with which we allwo scheduling of tasks from the app Priority: High, medium, low Time: Xminutes Optimal Done period: Today, This week, Next Week, This month, this year Mode: Spread vs ASAP

All this needs to be balanced with existing external calendar entries (cant be booked over). The order above is essentially how we follow in order to determine slot options. But it is quite complicated.

• Workflow tasks, these are tasks which create a new task upon completiton. For example; when doing a kombucha I need to check on it 7 days after and 10 days after. For learning, I like to review my tasks a week later and a month later to reinforce the knowledge. Things like this are often alot of work for me. So this makes it simpler.

• Scheduling and re-jigging: I think upon grabbing tasks out of the backlog we dont want to move tasks already planned. But also sometimes we do in the case of something urgent coming up. So both functionality needs to be available ie. an API for scheduling one, scheduling all from backlog, rescheduling all from booked in.

Key learnings

• Google calendar API is super flexible and over-returns alot of the time.
• Server side caching was very important for performance and building out fine grained API's instead of calling the calendar API for absolutely everything.
• OAuth, playing around with googles API access and authroization for user data instead of a service account (which I have used for other things)
• Continual improvement through usage, because its a tool which I go about using daily I constantly see flaws and improvements.