Preface

The reason is that I recently have quite a lot of tasks and needed a schedule management software again, but it seems I’ve finally found one that suits me well.

Schedule Management Software That Fails to Meet Needs

Looking back to high school, I still kept the habit of writing down homework in a notebook that I started in elementary school (though I slacked off towards the end), but indeed, “a good memory is not as good as a bad pen.” Writing things down ensures you can find them when you look for them, and besides homework, there was nothing else recorded.

Since starting university and getting my own phone, I naturally stopped using small notebooks for homework, so I needed a schedule management app on my phone. At first, I just used the phone’s built-in Notes app to simply record when the deadlines for various course assignments were. It was okay, but sometimes, without reminders, I would forget to check even if I had written it down, and I wouldn’t clear them in time.

After joining some organizations, schedule management became complicated: when to post articles, when there were events, when there were meetings, weekly meetings… a mess. At this point, Notes was a bit inadequate. After evaluating many software options, I chose TickTick. It had a to-do list, weekly and monthly views, but recurring tasks were a paid feature… After using it for a while, I quickly gave up. I was too lazy to add recurring tasks like weekly meetings one by one, and accidentally clicking a task meant it took half a day to find it again in the trash bin… and so on.

Later, after leaving the Youth Volunteer Association and joining some project teams, the need on my phone actually decreased because most of the time I was working indoors. In this case, it would be best to operate on a computer. After trying some software, I simply used the built-in Sticky Notes on Windows, which essentially functioned as a to-do list. However, it had no time settings, no various views, no recurring tasks; it was just a sticky note. Besides being lazy about cleaning it up, I also stopped updating it frequently.

Later, I used Google Calendar. To be honest, I found it quite comfortable to use. It integrates with many other apps; for example, if you receive a meeting invitation in your email, you can add it directly to Google Calendar, and in Slack, you can automatically adjust your status based on Google Calendar. It also supports external links, drag-and-drop adjustments, and so on. However, for well-known reasons, it is inconvenient to use once you leave the indoor environment.

What Are My Needs?

From small notebooks, Notes, calendars to to-do lists, TickTick, Windows Sticky Notes, Pomodoro timers, Wolai, and Google Calendar, it seems that every schedule management software has failed to fully satisfy me. I started wondering: is this my problem? What exactly are my needs? What are the absolute requirements for my schedule management?

Before this, my understanding of my needs was actually quite chaotic. I didn’t have a very clear perception of them, always attributing the issues to the software’s shortcomings rather than the software failing to meet specific needs of mine.

Here, I have summarized two parts. Actually, the needs are simple, but they require not just a schedule management software, but a combination of a to-do list and a calendar view for schedule management.

Because many tasks do not have specific deadlines, putting them into a calendar view for schedule management can easily cause confusion. Or, placing them only in the calendar might feel unclear, whereas a simple list in Notes is more direct. Schedule management, on the other hand, refers to meetings (things that must be done at a specific date and time, not things that are due at a specific date and time).

  • To-Do List: First and foremost, some tasks have no clear deadline; they are just things I want to do. Some are due on a specific day, and some are due at a specific time on a specific day. They need a list for clear display, making it easy to plan schedules for the coming days.
  • Schedule Management: For this, I prefer having weekly and monthly views. An annual view doesn’t seem essential to me, but it might be very useful during annual summaries. Having a heatmap like GitHub’s would also be nice? This requires specific meeting times, and ideally, it should support box selection, allowing for quick division and planning of time blocks. At the same time, recurring tasks are a must-have feature.
  • Other: The most important item, and the reason why I am dissatisfied with many mobile schedule management apps, is cross-device synchronization. This is really important; you never want to enter the same content twice. Ideally, it should support push notifications across multiple devices. Another point is the quick creation of tasks or schedules. You never want to spend two minutes tweaking a task here and there to create two separate tasks.
  • Bonus Features: It would be best if I could place it directly on my Blog or other web pages. This serves two purposes: it makes it convenient for colleagues or others to understand my schedule and arrange their work accordingly, and it allows me to edit online. In this way, using the web page achieves cross-device synchronization, and you don’t even need to download any client.

Feishu — A Temporary Alternative

First, I won’t casually use small, obscure software. Such apps are often irresponsible with your data and may not exist for the long term, so some of your records might disappear forever if they go out of business.

Feishu is a product of ByteDance. Being from a major tech company, data security is naturally guaranteed. Another reason I used it is that other projects required Feishu, so I casually looked into it. Surprisingly, I found that it could basically meet my needs: it has tasks and a calendar, supports cross-device synchronization, offers multiple views, and allows box selection…

Another surprising feature is that it actually has an auxiliary time zone function. When I wasn’t involved in any cross-border projects, I thought this feature was absolutely useless. But when I actually had the need, I found it truly amazing; it’s much better than searching for time differences on Baidu every time.

The only regret might be the inability to link tasks with the calendar, so that some tasks can be automatically added to the calendar.

Open-Source Software and Serverless

Given this need and my heavy daily surfing on GitHub, I naturally thought of using some open-source projects. I have to admit, there are indeed some well-made ones with web views and decent aesthetics. However, they don’t provide deployment instructions and require you to purchase their Pro features. Sigh… That’s also understandable; maintaining this data naturally incurs some costs. And if a schedule management app starts showing ads, guess who would still use it?

Serverless itself cannot use databases for storage, and any update creates a new environment, making it impossible to persist data. However, deploying via Serverless is indeed feasible. You don’t need to buy a server; you only need an OSS or a database, which might cost just a few dozen yuan per year? You can get a huge amount of storage, which is more than enough for small data like schedules.

But the only real challenge is authentication. I haven’t figured out how to handle authentication for Serverless yet. Can’t we just use GET + Token? Although that would technically work, it looks a bit silly…

Maybe in the future, once my frontend coding skills are deep enough, I could build and maintain an open-source project myself?