setamies/google-calendar-enhancer

Makes google calendar better

Google Calendar Enhancer

Why pay for google calendar time insights when you can get the same functionality for free?

This app enhances Google Calendar by adding functionality to help plan your days/weeks/months. For instance, using the app, you can quickly get information about how much time you've spent/are going to spend doing certain activities during a specific timeframe.

Functionality

Currently, the program has three useable commands: store-data, summary, and help.

store-data

When store-data is called, it stores your google calendar events from the specified calendar. If called alone, it fetches and stores calendar events between a specified date (2022-08-29 by default, can be changed at /store_data/storeData.py) to the current day.

Alternatively, one can pass a second argument, which should be a date in "yyyy-mm-dd" format. In such an event, it fetches data between the default from_date to the given date. Below is an example that fetches data between 2022-08-29 to 2022-11-07

cl store-data 2022-11-07

summary

summary can be run without arguments, which returns a current-day summary. Alternatively, it can be given 1-3 additional arguments:

• [activity]

  • Can be - in which case default activities are returned.
  • Replace - with the activity of interest to only fetch information about that specific activity.

• [timespan]

  • Can be year/month/week/day
  • The default arg is "date", filtering the df by dates

• [specificity]

  • By default, it fetches the current date.
  • Can be given a value of total, which provides total hours for specified activities.
  • Can be given a week/year/day/date, e.g., 45 (week), giving total hours spent on that period

Example line of code:

• Returns total hours spent on a list of pre-specified activities, which can be changed from /summary/getData.py

cl summary - week total

help

Returns information about the other commands.

Installation

For the program to work, you must download a google API key and fetch data from your calendar. [work in progress, details about this will be posted later]

To run this program via terminal in Linux, you need to make changes to your .bashrc file.

Open .bashrc

$ vim ~/.bashrc

Add the alias

Ubuntu has a default command called cal, so I went with the alias "cl." Make the alias go to the google-calendar-enhancer working directory, and then run main.py.

alias cl='cd /home/lauri/programming/google-calendar-enhancer/ && python main.py

Et voilà! Now you can run the program from your terminal

For example, to get your events for this day, write the following:

cl summary

Future update ideas

• Improve functionality of the store-data command:

  • For example, make it possible to alter the default from_date
  • Enable storing data by typing a week, month, etc., and taking the last day of the specified timeframe.
  • Refrain from overriding the (possibly) existing database each time the command is run.

• Add data analytics

• ColorId categorization:

  • This would enable more imaginative names for activities and more exciting insights in the long run. I haven't added this functionality yet, because for some reason, google calendars default activity color doesn't have a colorId, and I am greatly fond of the default color.
  • Wordcloud from activities

• Improve error handling. At the moment, the program will throw cryptic messages to unsuspecting users.

  • For instance, if the user tried to run the summary command before there is a database, the program can't hande it.

Recent updates:

• Built a new command (update) that enables overwriting data beginning from a certain date.
• Created a new function called updateData and made changes to csvHandler.