DayHacker
by Shimon Rura, [email protected]

DayHacker is a python program that generates a one-page PDF you can use to
track your daily schedule and how you spend your time. The recommended use
is to print off the page each morning, and track how you spend each hour
during the day using a scoring system that encourages you to devote time
toward your most important goals.

LICENSE

This software is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version
3. For details see the file LICENSE.

FEATURES

 * Most Important Things - write down the 3 things you most want to
   accomplish today. This helps avoid getting pulled in by distractions.

 * Pulls your calendar data from an iCal feed - if you use Google Calendar
   or anything else with an iCal feed, dayhacker will pull in that data and
   include it on your PDF in the appropriate hour slot.

 * Weather - pulls weather conditions & forecast for today, so you know if
   you should put on a jacket.

 * Customizable scoring - set up to 5 categories for how you spend your
   time, and the hourly score for each. This scoring is a little trick to
   encourage you to reflect on how you're spending your time, so you should
   take the time to adjust it to your current life goals.

 * Custom reminders - you can set custom reminders (currently only on a
   monthly basis). So if you need to move your car for street cleaning on
   the second Wednesday of every month, dayhacker can help you avoid getting
   towed.

HOW TO USE IT

1. Install the python modules we depend on:
   - vobject   (feed parsing)
   - reportlab (PDF generation)
   (let me know if i forgot something)

2. Copy dayhacker_personalization.py.template to
   dayhacker_personalization.py, and follow the instructions inside to edit
   it to include your iCal feed URL and other personalized settings.

3. Run the program (PDF output goes to stdout):
   $ python dayhacker.py > today.pdf

   Or print it using pdf2ps:
   dayhacker.py > today.pdf && pdf2ps today.pdf - | lpr

   Or put it in your crontab to print at 7am each morning, with a standard daily survey on the back:
   0 7  *   *   *     /home/shimon/hacks/dayhacker/dayhacker.py > /tmp/dayhacker-shimon-today.pdf && /usr/bin/pdftk /tmp/dayhacker-shimon-today.pdf /home/shimon/hacks/dayhacker/daily_survey.pdf cat output /tmp/dayhacker-shimon-today-with-survey.pdf && /usr/bin/pdf2ps /tmp/dayhacker-shimon-today-with-survey.pdf - | lpr
   

4. As you go through the day, keep the printed sheet with you. Every hour or
   two, look back at the sheet and write down what you did in the preceding
   hours.

5. At the end of the day, score the whole day.

6. Each week, review the week's scores to look for patterns and consider
   rebalancing your scores or identifying different goals.

7. Write a blog post explaining your system! I'm really curious how people
   might use dayhacker.


KNOWN ISSUES

 * The calendar feed does not properly handle recurring events. Only
   single-point scheduled events show up reliably on dayhacker.

 * Some calendar feeds include datestamps with an invalid year. It's not
   uncommon to see a lot of these sorts of warning messages on stderr while
   running dayhacker:

Warning: could not parse datetime ('00001231T000000Z', None); using now instead.
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/shimon/.u/hacks/dayhacker/dayhackercal.py", line 16, in new_stringToDateTime
    return vobject.icalendar.stringToDateTime_OLD(s, tzinfo)
  File "/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.6/vobject/icalendar.py", line 1620, in stringToDateTime
    return datetime.datetime(year, month, day, hour, minute, second, 0, tzinfo)
ValueError: year is out of range

   DayHacker monkeypatches vobject so this sort of crap doesn't cause
   DayHacker to crash, but it probably does screw up the handling of certain
   events. Maybe this is related to the bug of missing recurring events, but
   I haven't investigated yet.