Reflect

Do you ever feel like nothing will happen unless it's on your schedule? Every hour is labeled and every task is scheduled; online calendars have become the backbone of how we organize our lives.

Back in November, a friend and I were planning a surprise party (another friend of ours had just recieved an offer from Meta after months of stress). We both instinctively pulled out our phones to add every detail (where to meet, who to invite, etc.) to our calendars...and this isn't just a Type A, overcommitted Stanford student phenomenon. 70 percent of adults now use online calendars, and only 28.3 percent of Americans still prefer paper ones. There's this urgent, habitual feeling I think many of us share: if it doesn't get written down, there's a lingering anxiety that it won't happen. Or worse, that we'll forget about it entirely.

Google Calendar, one of the most widely used tools for personal scheduling, makes it easy to plan what's ahead via the day, week, and month views. But it offers very little insight into what's already happened. Worse than forgetting a task or missing an event is not being able to tell whether your time is going toward things that matter to you, or whether it's being drained by things that don't.

Reflect connects to your Google Calendar, pulls in past events, and automatically categorizes them into buckets like meetings, classes, workouts, and more. All you have to do is sign into your Google account. I used OAuth 2.0 for secure sign-in, the Google Calendar API to fetch historical event data, and Python with Flask to build the backend. Once events are fetched, they're processed using custom rules to sort them into categories, and then visualized using interactive charts that show both time spent and event frequency.

Reflect is hosted on a free cloud platform service (Render), so the site may take a few seconds to load. reflect.jessie-dong.com

In addition to visualizing how your time is distributed, Reflect also surfaces unique insights from your calendar history. Reflect shows you your diversity score, your longest event, and even gives you a personality read based on your calendar patterns. Below is a snapshot of a section of my friend, Syd Prier's Reflect dashboard. Because of Google's privacy requirements, any app accessing calendar data must be approved. If you'd like to use Reflect with your own account, I can add you as a test user if you email me.