I use pocket mod and make a custom 8 page todo/calendar that I use every day. It works well for me, but I’ve also adapted my life to the way it works.

If you want to try something in these lines, David Seah has some pretty awesome printables perfected over the years. I’ve used them like 10+ years ago, and I still like to print out some copies and tinker around. However, I have changed my ways of using pen and paper. His work is extremely detailed. I heard many restaurants have standardized on some of this work.

https://davidseah.com/productivity-tools/

> If you have tentative plans like “lunch with a friend sometime next week” there is no obvious way to add this to your calendar in a way that differentiates it from an important appointment that can’t be missed.

Does Google Calendar not let you mark events as tentative? Outlook does and I’ve always taken that for granted.

Speaking of Outlook, they used to have a board view that I think was conceptually quite close to achieving the large free form canvas experience of a paper calendar. Retired years ago though. https://www.computerworld.com/article/1616186/how-to-use-out...

i need a digital calendar because i share it and other people put things into the calendar, that i need to know of.

I'm really hoping for a sketchy map. I really wish I could use my iPad Mini to plan motorcycle trips.

I am curious to see how this unfolds. I know that for many people, myself included, that the main appeal of a digital calendar is the edit-ability of it. I can move, edit, and even copy. And it's in text format (as opposed to ink) so that also means "readable" (in contrast to the chicken scratch that is my handwriting) and searchable.

I'm looking forward to see how this develops.

There was a program a long time ago, classic Mac OS days, and I don't remember the name of it but I think it was "<something> Consistency". I loved it because tasks in it were "loose," in the sense that something like "water the plants" didn't have to happen on a strict 7-day repeating event. It could be defined as "should be done 6-8 days after the last time I did it." So when you hit "done" on the current "water the plants" task, it automatically fuzzy-scheduled the next "water the plants" event with a target date of 6-8 days after when you clicked done. You could have the range prefer some days but be "acceptable" for a wider range of days.

Someone once told me emacs org-mode might be able to schedule recurring tasks somewhat like this. But any time I see a new calendar/to-do manager application, I hope the designers keep this "fuzzy" repeating event idea in mind!

This kind of exists with things like RocketBook and Neo smartpens. They require special books for the latter:

https://shop.neosmartpen.com/collections/journals-notebooks/...

LLMs are good enough that if you can stand up a small video capturing app on your iphone, then you can live transcribe. I believe the LLMs are good enough that if you just write legibly, then you can give it ad-hoc commands in any way you want (e.g "Add this to iCal").

A cheap document reader gets your half way there:

https://www.amazon.com/Kitchbai-Document-Visualiser-Micropho...

I'm expecting something like this to be part of the suite of devices OpenAI will release. Shifting away from tapping things into phones all the time to leveraging all of the mechanical things we do outside of phones.

The product would be an aesthetic document scanner with a mic, so you can make comprehensive notes with additional voice transcribing. Seems like an ideal thing to have on a scratchpad desk for quick notes, because eink note-takes are actually really good now days (just overpriced).

Excited to see what comes out of this. Like many others, I struggle to keep up with a Calendar app. They don't give satisfaction when using them, making it harder to stick with them day after day.

Using pen & paper, I have a hard time following my schedule because I don't receive notifications when an event or time block is about to start. LOL

I struggled with this problem for a long time. I sort of solved it.

The key was to realize that there is a difference between a calendar, a todo list, and an agenda.

A todo list is a list of things that need to be done but usually don’t have a specific time when they need to be done at. They can have priorities or deadlines or fuzzy target dates like “next week.”

A calendar is for storing future concretely scheduled events.

An agenda is a list of things that will happen soon.

Each day I pull things from my calendar, todo list, and prior agenda and create my daily agenda. I also keep notes, doodles, clippings, and references in my agenda.

I use Google calendar as my calendar. It meets my expectations.

For my todo list I use Notion. I break it down into “next, soon, and later”. I add ad-hoc sections like “after the vacation” when needed. Some todo items are scheduled for a specific day or “not sooner than.” I add these to my calendar with an email reminder so they don’t take up any mind space until needed.

Finally, the daily agenda. I use Notion but could probably use a physical notepad. I like being able to archive them as sometimes I need to check when I did something or pull some details from notes. With a digital agenda I can file it into an archive easily.

This is not perfect but it helped me reconcile the rigidity of calendar tools with the need to do keep things freeform in the short term.