Automatic holiday breaks

Tech
1

I’ve been toying with the idea of making something that will automatically schedule breaks on national holidays. Basically like the weekends-off feature but on steroids.
We got 13 of them where I live and my awareness of them is usually… well there’s a reason I want this to be automated.
For this there are publicly available .ics files which you can import into calendar apps and my idea is to automatically schedule breaks for every (whole-day) event that is in there.
This also allows it to be used for something other than holidays, e.g. school breaks.
My local FabLab has their calendar with meetings and events online as an .ics file and to ensure I don’t have time demanding goals on these days this would be useful as well.

Thoughts?

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2

+1 for that idea.

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3

I would love this. Especially since I often want to do weird stuff like (real examples):

  • Give me breaks on these three goals Friday thru Sunday every week.
  • Only make me do this goal on Sundays.
  • Give me a break on these goals every other Monday.

If I could set up recurring events in a calendar in order to make this stuff happen automatically, I’d be thrilled.

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4

What about whole-day events that aren’t breaks, though? I use whole-day events all the time for things I need to do on a given day.

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5

Do you have those in the same calendar as your break-worthy events?

6

You mean the different google calendar colors? Yes, the same color calendar has events I’d want to break for and ones I wouldn’t. I guess the idea is that people would make a separate calendar just for beebreaks and use that?

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7

Yeah, pretty much. In case of your events, how would a program differentiate between break worthy and not break worthy? Something in the title? In the notes? Something else?

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I was assuming it would be a separate calendar. It’s pretty easy to create an additional calendar within the same Google account if you’re using Google calendar.

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9

If it’s a separate calendar, then no need to restrict it to whole-day events. Say I put in a trip on the special beebreak calendar from 2pm 5/2 to 3pm 5/6 - then it should put in a break for 5/2-5/6 even though 5/2 and 5/6 aren’t designated as whole days.

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