Ask HN: Powerusers, why do all major calendar apps miss the same feature?

3 points by cvigoe 7 years ago | 4 comments

Suppose there is a fixed deadline for submitting a report at 13:00. I have spent the last 2 hours looking at various calendar apps and it seems that almost every app forces me to treat this deadline as an event with a start time at 13:00 and an end time at 13:01 or 13:00 if I'm lucky. In other words, the best I seem to be able to do is treat the deadline as an event and try and make it as short as I can. I find this more annoying that I probably should, but I feel like deadlines, checkpoints etc. are all fundamentally different "things" to events in that they are a single moment in time as opposed to a prolonged period (think single point on a line vs. an interval).

Does anyone know of a calendar app that treats things differently?

cvigoe 7 years ago |

Some calendars (google, native mac) allow for events that have 0 time, but they are displayed as a block of time on the calendar instead of a single horizontal line (when I look at the thin block, my OCD kicks in and asks whether the deadline is the start of the block, the end, the middle...?)

Makes me feel more and more that pen and paper is the way to go.

walterclifford 7 years ago | |

> when I look at the thin block, my OCD kicks in and asks whether the deadline is the start of the block, the end, the middle

OCD is a disorder where a person has uncontrollable reoccurring thoughts and behaviors that he or she feels the urge to repeat over and over - it's not being unsure what a line on a calendar means https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/obsessive-compulsive-...

masonic 7 years ago |

Something like Reminders in Google Calendar, then?

cvigoe 7 years ago | |

That doesn’t show a graphical element of when the reminder is scheduled to occur at, as far as I can tell. But that is the type of distinction I’m thinking of: event vs reminder