Quick ASCII Views of a Week or So

Or: Thinking Aloud While Planning for the Holidays

When can I think during the next two weeks? The top representation wasted lots of space and had poor resolution due to the way Emacs displays org-mode tables. The bottom representation shows 15 minute increments (vice the kludgy 30 of the top) and uses space much more efficiently. (Image by me. Copying and modification are permitted, with or without attribution.)

With the odd schedules of the holidays coming up, I wanted an uncluttered way to represent in ASCII and around the scale of a week, the time available to me for deep work. So, yesterday evening, I fiddled around for a while and came up with a solution I thought adequate, but annoying.

I could indeed get a rough idea of how much time I had over the next week or so, but creating or changing the representation was more difficult than I liked, my resolution was only to the nearest half-hour, and it took up more space than I liked.

In fact, it came close to defeating the purpose of having it within my task list file.

Fortunately, while I was in the shower this morning, it dawned on me that I could just represent time I could not use for deep work linearly. You can see the result on the bottom half of the screenshot. (The top half shows the same data (except Tuesday the 24th) in the less satisfactory format.) This is easier to read; easier to generate or change; has a more useful, quarter-hour resolution; and takes up less space.

A different symbol greatly improved legibility. (Image by me. Copying and modification are permitted, with or without attribution.)

For my current purpose, it will do nicely; perhaps some extra tweaking would improve it. It's tempting to geek out on some more on this, but I'm going to throw it out here for now, in case passer-by could use it as is or for a starting point.

-- CAV

P.S. Well, okay: One more change. Capital X worked much better! (And yes, the data don't exactly match across all the calendars: Those changes are intentional.)

P.P.S. I probably should have mentioned: The blank areas are mine.