Day Planner Feature?

[Scott_Lusignan]

Hey Airtable,

Unbelievable app you have here. We’re doing extraordinary things with it.

I hope this is requested by others, but what we would LOVE to see in the near future is some sort of simple “Today Planner” planner that we can use to drill down into the calendar hour by hour. This would add a next level to our scheduling with your app. Please let me know if this is something you have already planned (or if it exists, I just can’t find the button for it) or if its a pipe dream.

Thanks again for all you guys do :slightly_smiling_face:

[Ruchika_Nambiar]

Hey Scott, this is probably very late in the discussion here, but I was struggling with the same thing this week and I think I found a workaround. It’s not ideal and a little roundabout, but it works for me. I too wanted to have my time blocked out in each day, and not just see a list of tasks with no sense of duration. I added a “Duration” field, but all the tasks still appeared as the same sized block in my daily/weekly view, they wouldn’t expand based on duration. So I couldn’t see if a task would run for only half an hour, or two hours or three hours, everything looked the same.

Then I decided to try removing the duration field and added an “End Date” field instead – in this field, I simply use the same date as the “Start date”, and I only change the time. So for example if a task is three hours long I set Start Date as [14 May, 10 AM] and End date as [14 May, 1 PM]. And then in my calendar view settings, I enable the date range feature so that it takes both start and end date. And now my timeblocking works the way I want it to and I’m able to see how long each task is at a glance. Sure it’s a little tedious to feed in the date and time all over again, but I’m sure there’s a way to just automate that with a formula that can add “duration” to the “start date and time” in order to automatically generate the “end date and time”.

Here I’ve highlighted the two tasks that I tested it out on:

[Ruchika_Nambiar]

Just another update, I did finally create a formula to calculate “end time”. So now I don’t have to manually enter the end time & date each time, I can create my task as usual with a date, start time and duration and then formula adds start time + duration to determine the end time.

Here’s the formula:

And here’s what my final timeblocked week looks like:

The ONLY slight drawback:
Because the “end date” is a computed field, I can no longer drag and move tasks to different slots in my calendar view like I used to. I now have to change the duration/start time in order to move it anywhere else.

[Jason]

Hi @Ruchika_Nambiar,

I saw your solution and wanted to offer a workaround - using automations - to help out with the drawback you mentioned.

Ruchika_Nambiar:

Because the “end date” is a computed field, I can no longer drag and move tasks to different slots in my calendar view like I used to. I now have to change the duration/start time in order to move it anywhere else.

First, setup a new “End Time” field as a regular date field (with time enabled). Keep your existing formula field - you’ll use this in the automation. Then create a new automation. For the trigger step, select the “When a record is updated” trigger and configure it as shown in the screenshot below.

Then, add the “Update record” action and configure it like the screenshot below.

With this setup, the automation will look for any changes to the start, end, or duration fields, and then use the end date calculated in the formula field to update the end date. This will provide the ability to autogenerate the end date as well as move records around in the calendar view.

Here’s a quick video showing everything together. Hope this helps!

[Ruchika_Nambiar]

Hi @Jason, thanks SO much for this, it is absolutely perfect now. In fact, after I used your tip, I realized I could not only move my tasks around in the calendar, I could also drag and expand the size of each timeblock, changing its duration. But then I realized I needed to make a slight modification to the whole system:

If I dragged and expanded a 1-hour block to make it a 3-hour block, it would eventually snap back to 1-hour because the end time is being determined by the “duration” which is a manually entered value. So no matter what I expand the block to, it always snaps back to the amount of time that I’ve set in the duration field. So I changed up the calculations just a bit:

• In the End Time automation you suggested, I removed “End Time” from the watch list. So now it only watches for updates in “Start” and “Duration”, and if either of those change, then it updates the end time accordingly.
• Then I created a new formula field called “Duration Calculator” which calculates the difference between end and start time, using this formula: DATETIME_DIFF({End Time},{Start Time},‘seconds’)
  • Then I created another automation “Duration Calculator” which watches for updates only in “End time”. So if end time gets updated, it will then update the duration field with the value from the new formula field.

So now I’m able to drag a task to change the size of the block, which updates the end time of the task, which in turn updates the duration. This is great because this is exactly the type of calendar I wanted to create in the first place, so this is pretty much perfect for me.

The only thing is I can only expand or compress a task downwards (i.e. such that it only changes the “end time”). If I try dragging and expanding a task upwards, it only changes the start time, which has no effect on duration because the automation is only watching for “end time”. So if I have a 7-8pm task set for a 1 hour duration, if I drag it upwards to 6pm, it won’t change the duration to 2 hours. Instead the whole 1-hour block will now snap up to 6-7pm.

I tried making the automation watch for both “start time” and “end time”, but the thing is then it creates an endless feedback loop between the two automations (“End time calculation” and “duration calculation”), so the duration keeps changing back and forth endlessly. But anyway, that’s a minor hitch, I’m not complaining.

This is pretty perfect as it stands. Thanks so much for your help!

[Ruchika_Nambiar]

Oh wait I think I just figured out the solution to this problem too:

Ruchika_Nambiar:

I tried making the automation watch for both “start time” and “end time”, but the thing is then it creates an endless feedback loop between the two automations (“End time calculation” and “duration calculation”), so the duration keeps changing back and forth endlessly. But anyway, that’s a minor hitch, I’m not complaining.

I just changed my end-time automation to only watch for updates in the “duration” field. And I changed my duration automation to watch for updates in both “start time” and “end time”. So now I can drag and expand my timeblocks both ways as well as move my tasks around to different slots in the calendar.

It is officially perfect. I didn’t think I could love Airtable any more than I already did.

[Jason]

Ruchika_Nambiar:

It is officially perfect. I didn’t think I could love Airtable any more than I already did.

Wonderful to hear @Ruchika_Nambiar !

[Matt_Grainger]

This sounds so awesome and just what i’m looking for. Would you be kind enough to screen shot the formulas and automations set up? In your own time of course.

[Dustin_Thacker]

Hi. First time here…long time user but never ventured into too many customizations before.
This thread is really great but I can’t quite get this to work. I know it is a year old and the automation interface has changed a bit and such. But I’ve tried following this and the tweaks made too but just can’t get it to work. Also can’t get the pushing and pulling of timeslots in the calendar to work either.
Were there other changes / updates to airtable that now make this walkthrough less relevant?
If so, is it possible to get an updated version of how to achieve this?
Thank you for any help.