Reschedule

Goal

I want to keep track of all my todos in a plain text file but also automatically schedule my todos on my google calendar. When I write my todos in a todo list I often fail to allocate time for them in my calendar. When I look at my week I feel like I have tons of free time but in reality I have a full day of work to do. As an example this is what my week looks like without todos vs. with todos (in orange).

This program automatically parses todos from a markdown file and schedules them on a google calendar.

- [ ] task name est:10m due:2020-03-20 id:1f2a4b

Installation

Using python >3.6

pip install reschedule

Now you can reschedule your todos by running reschedule from the command line. The first time you run reschedule you'll be prompted to authorize with google and a config file will be created for you at ~/.cache/reschedule/config.json.

Configuration

{
  "work_start_time": "08:00",
  "work_end_time": "18:00",
  "task_file_path": "~/todo.md",
  "task_calendar_name": "Reschedule Tasks",
  "chunk_size": 15,
  "default_est": "30m"
}

• work_start_time: the earliest a task will be scheduled to start in %H:%M format. (i.e. military time such as 08:30 or 23:00)
• work_end_time: the latest a task will be scheduled to end in %H:%M format. (i.e. military time such as 08:30 or 23:00)
• task_file_path: the absolute path to your markdown file of tasks
• task_calendar_name: the name of the google calendar this program will create to store your tasks. Must be unique from an existing calendar.
• chunk_size: the minimum length of an event. 15 is a good default to keep your day from becoming too fragmented.
• default_est: the default time estimate for a task

Task File Format

Task are written using markdown task-list format. To create a task use a new line with - [ ]. To mark a task as complete use - [x]. Metadata is attached to tasks using a key:value syntax. The key and the value cannot contain spaces or :. I call an instance of a key:value pair a tag, for instance an id tag is a key:value pair with a key of id. Every task needs a unique id tag for example id:1aab7d. Tasks can have an est tag which contains a time estimate written as 30m or 1h for 30 minutes or 1 hour respectively. Any number followed by m or h is acceptable as a value for the est tag. Finally tasks can have a due tag which contains a due-date formatted as YYYY-MM-dd.

<!-- A task with an estimate of 30 minutes, due March 6, 2020, with id 16cfe6 -->

- [ ] What you want to do est:30m due:2020-03-06 id:16cfe6

VSCode Snippets

I use the following user defined VSCode Markdown Snippets to create my tasks.

  // add a new task
  "task": {
    "prefix": "//task",
    "body": [
      "- [ ] ${1:What do you want to do?} est:${2:30m} id:$RANDOM_HEX"
    ]
  },
  // add a due date to a task
  "due": {
    "prefix": "//due",
    "body": "due:${1:$CURRENT_YEAR}-${2:$CURRENT_MONTH}-${3:$CURRENT_DATE}"
  },
  // create a random variable
  "random": {
    "prefix": "//random",
    "body": "$RANDOM_HEX"
  }