SPDCA: The idkfa reminder page: http://idkfa.com/v3/reminders.php

Recently, in trying to figure out ways to manage my time better at work, I got the idea that it would be nice to have something that could calculate whether something could be done by a certain date. For example, if I estimated something would take 20 hours, how many business days, given an 8 hour work day, would it take? And what if that 20 hours was in conflict with another work load, due before then? In that case, what was the soonest I would be able to complete all of the tasks?

Investigating this, I found that it was useful, but somewhat limited. At the same time I wanted this type of date calculation, I also wanted simpler reminders for things outside of my hourly pool, or just simple notes that I could reference. I also wanted to record items to be notified of at a later date, or ones that would auto-cancel after a certain time period.

At first I was content with using Google Calendar and its tasks, but this didn't provide the kind of work-hour calculation I wanted. I experimented with the Linux remind utility a bit, but decided that though it was fairly powerful, it wasn't perfectly suited to what I wanted. It was also the case that I had to be SSH'd into my server at home, which made it inconvenient for accessing from my phone, etc.

So I made the script above. You can enter options for new reminders, notes, notifications, and task estimates. Based on which fields you decide to fill out, the script tries to just "do the right thing." If you enter nothing but a message, it will just be a note. If you enter either a "Notify Until" or "Notify After" value, it will hide reminders until/after a given date. If you enter a due date, it will calculate the time until the due date and display them in a sort of "countdown" format. If you enter in a "Remaining Hours" estimate, it will try to show relevant work-hour information based on an 8-hour work day and Mon-Fri work week.

The nice part of this is that it is fairly flexible on how you enter your date information. I used a date parsing library that can support almost any format, given that the distinction between day, month, and year are clear. I also modified it a bit to add features like being able to put in something like "25", and have it be translated to "the 25th of the current month, or the next month in the event that the 25th has passed."

Another feature is that the page isn't rendered on the server, it's instead smart enough to render itself based on the raw data returned from the server. As a result, you can modify the output of the page without having to refresh, making the addition and modification of reminders quick to see which reminder "bucket" they go into. It also supports the "auto-update" feature on idkfa,

It may be that I end up being the only person that uses this, and that's fine. I'm not even sure I'll end up using this extensively. Mostly just glad it's over with, as it was cutting into my Star Trek time.