Google Calendar Tools

This repo contains a series of calendar tools that have helped manage my calendar.

Table of Contents

• Tools/Methods
  • createEndingSoonEvents
  • blockWorkCalWithPersonEventPlaceholders
  • createWalkEvent
  • cleanup
• Setup and Deploy

Tools/Methods

createEndingSoonEvents

This is useful to get a notification that a calendar event is ending soon.

Example: this created a Ending Soon: Busy at 20:45pm - 20:45pm for the Busy event from 20:30pm - 20:45pm

It works by looking at your work calendar, then creating a Ending Soon: XXXX event at the ending time of your event on a 2nd calendar. These are one off events, each subsequent event will have its own.

Setup:

• You'll need to create a calendar, I called mines ending-soon-cal, and provide the calendar ID in the configurations.
• Don't forget to set up the reminders!
• I have a calendar default reminder to go off at 5m and 0m prior to the event.

blockWorkCalWithPersonEventPlaceholders

Double Booked all the time because of a personal event that didn't show up on your work calendar?? It's a pain to share a personal event with your work calendar for each event. It's also a pain to manually block out time on your work calendar for those events.

This script will look at your personal calendar, and create Busy events on your work calendar at the same time as your personal event.

Example: this created a Busy event for my personal event moooooooo

These are private events so no one calendar stalking you can see the title/details, to take it one step further, the placeholder event's title is just Busy (configurable).

The only identifying information is the eventID, which I believe is randomly generated when creating a Calendar Event. I don't believe this leaks any information unless your calendar is shared or public. At that point, someone maybe able to find the event. Buuuut... your calendar is already public 🤔, so 🤷‍♂️.

createWalkEvent

This will create "sunset walk events" that will get generated depending on your provided longitude and latitude. I use this to remind myself to go take a walk during the Golden Hour.

Example event: this created a [placeholder] Sunset Walk @16:58, starting 1 hour before sunset and ending 30m after sunset

cleanup

Is a helper script to remove all events on a calendar. Use with caution!

It's useful to blast away the events created by the createEndingSoonEvents or createWalkEvent

Setup and Deploy

1. Create a file ./config.ts that contains

   export const Config = {
     BlockWorkCalWithPersonEventPlaceholders: {
       Enabled: true,
       WorkCalID: '[email protected]',
       PersonalCalID: '[email protected]',
       WorkEventPlaceholderTitle: 'Busy'
     },
     EndingSoonEvents: {
       Enabled: true,
       PrimaryCalID: '[email protected]', // id of the primary calendar to pull events from
       EndNotifCalID: '[email protected]', // id of the secondary calendar to push to
       LookAheadDays: 1 // days to look ahead and create events for
     },
     SunsetWalkEvents: {
       Enabled: true,
       DaysToCreate: 14,
       Latitude: 0.00, // your latitude
       Longitude: 0.00 // your longitude
     }
   };

2. Setup a Google App Script

   • Go to https://script.google.com/ and create a new Project.
   • From the URL, grab the id, it'll look something like https://script.google.com/home/projects/{YOUR_SCRIPT_ID_IS_HERE}/edit.
     • Another way to get it is to go to the ⚙️ Project Settings page and you can find your Script ID.
   • Add this to .clasp.json

     {
      "scriptId": "YOUR_SCRIPT_ID_IS_HERE",
      "rootDir": "dist"
     }

3. Install the packages

   npm i

4. Push it to Google Scripts

   clasp login
   npm run build-push

5. Setup a project trigger

   1. setup a time based trigger on the
   • sync function: every 30 minutes
   • createWalkEvent function: weekly every Monday 9-10am