Hi Product Hunters,
TL;DR
While reviewing last year's activities, I built this tool to look at how much time I spent in meetings vs. working. It surfaced interesting insights on who I met and how often. This was a quick weekend project with R and Shiny. After building it, I also wanted to make it available for others to use as well. Would love feedback in three forms (a) what was insightful about your data? (b) bugs and (c) feature requests.
Disclaimer: This only connects to Google Calendars. This tool does on-demand analysis and does not store any data on the server or the device. Since this a fun side project, I am not sure I can provide ongoing support to maintain this tool.
DETAILS
I was interested in computing how much work I did last last year. More importantly I was curious about my 'meetings' to 'work time' ratio. In the past, this analysis would have been difficult because working at large companies you don't get access to Outlook Exchange data (at least not easily). For the last year or so I have been using Google calendar diligently for my meetings.
In addition, in my recent chats with HR specialists the topic of employee time-spent, engagement and communications analysis kept coming up. It was clear that companies have little idea on how much time is wasted in meetings and task-switching. I wanted to build a tool that could surface some of this data.
A key goal with Calendar Insights Tool was to build a proof-of-concept that shows how knowledge about your time can be super helpful and actionable. It not only uncovers information about how much time is spent in meetings but also surfaces opportunities about which meetings and follow-ups that are falling through the cracks. The tool can eventually recommend which interactions to skip, which ones to follow-up on and suggest new people to meet.
I used a combination of the following tools: R, RShiny, Google API, Highcharts and a nifty little package called GoogleAuthR that helps glue some of this together. Thank you to Mark Edmondson for writing some amazing open source packages that made this easy. Only thing I wasn't able to find was an API call for Rapportive which could have been very cool.
Looking forward to your feedback.
Emad
