I think the reason I'm so much more productive at night is because I spend the whole day asking myself "How much time do I have left before my next meeting?" and I end up just being super anxious and unproductive.

So, obviously, I've been thinking about ways to avoid this.

For starters, this is no different from my local calendar app pulling event information from a remote server. If the remote server could push, life would be much easier. But that doesn't entirely solve the problem, if the time that's pushed to me is "5 minutes"...

...there's not a lot of meaningful stuff I can do in those 5 minutes. Maybe pet my cats. Which I do.

So let's say there's some chunk of time, E, which can be used to do meaningful amounts of work. As an aside: Yes, I avoided using T to represent that time to catch everyone off guard. Anyway, E can be different for each person, but let's use a tomato as an example and go with 25.

Assuming I need ~5 minutes to prep for whatever meeting is coming up as well, that brings E to 30 minutes for me. So I need E gap in between meetings to do meaningful work. Cool. But there will be plenty of times when I'll only have 5-15 minutes in between. What do I do then?

Well, we can assume that not all work is meaningful. So let's say anything that doesn't fit the bill for meaningful work is...menial? Clearing out the email inbox, responding to Slack messages, etc.

So that means I can fit meaningful work into all gaps >= E, and menial work into other gaps. Cool.

Note that interaction with pets is not menial work. It's a privilege. ^_^

Okay, so now we've set up some classification around time & work. Time to throw some automation and alerting in there so that I can have meaningful information _pushed_ to me so I don't have to worry about _pulling_ it.

I know, let's look at the Google Calendar API reference to see if we can catch a broadcasted event or something when a calendar event is ending. https://developers.google.com/calendar/v3/reference

Okay, I don't see anything like this in the API reference. And this unanswered question from 2019 makes me think it doesn't exist...at least in the form I wanted. https://support.google.com/calendar/thread/13472111?hl=en That's fine, I'll figure something out. Where there's an API, there's a way.

Well, first-cut naive strategy: Get events when the day starts, subscribe to event modifications by subscribing to push notifications ( https://developers.google.com/calendar/v3/push), maintain state for the next N events on the client so we're aware of start/end times, ...

... update local state on push notifications, calculate gap between events in state using a configurable E, then push notifications to human from the client based on these calculations. Client -> human notifications should contain time & activity classification information.

So if you were to build this using @getpostman, you'd need two monitors: One to listen to the push events, another to push notifications to the human. You'd also need some kind of storage, so an environment or @airtable comes into the picture.

Okay, time for breakfast now. Or is it lunch? Either way, I'll put this up on the @getpostman API Network whenever I build it.

Or the next person to join my team can build it as part of their onboarding! Did I mention that @getpostman is hiring? Come work with us (me)!

I didn't plan on taking this thread in this direction. lol. Actually, I didn't even plan this thread. :amaze: