Building a Unified Calendar, Notes, and Reminders Hub

I’ve been increasingly frustrated by the growing fragmentation of personal productivity. My schedule lives in one place, my notes in another, and my reminders somewhere else, each with its own interaction model, search experience, and notification behavior. The cost isn’t just an annoyance; it’s context loss. The information I need to make good decisions (what I’m doing, why I’m doing it, and what I need to do next) is scattered across tools that don’t meaningfully talk to each other.

That friction is what’s motivating my next project: a cross-platform app that merges calendar events, tasks, and notes into a single, realistic planning view, without forcing users to abandon the calendar providers they already trust.

The core idea: timeline first, context always

At the heart of the product is a unified daily/weekly timeline where events and tasks coexist. Meetings, appointments, and deadlines should be visible together so plans reflect reality. A task with a due time should show up alongside a meeting; a task with only a due date should still be present on that day as an all-day item. The goal is simple: fewer surprises, fewer missed commitments, and less mental bookkeeping.

Just as important is “context on demand.” A calendar entry shouldn’t be a dead-end. If a meeting has prep notes, an agenda, or a list of follow-ups, those should be directly accessible from the event. Likewise, tasks should be linkable to richer notes, turning the calendar into a hub rather than a grid of isolated blocks.

Integrations, not replacements

Instead of developing another separate calendar backend, we plan to integrate with Google Calendar initially and then extend support to Microsoft Outlook/Office 365 (Graph) and Apple iCloud Calendar via CalDAV. That means users can keep their existing calendars intact while the app focuses on the unified experience: normalization, aggregation, and clean interaction patterns.

This provider-first approach also forces rigor in the product architecture: authentication flows, token storage, rate limits, recurring event handling, and time zones all need to be treated as first-class concerns.

Notes and tasks as native primitives

While calendars will be integrated, notes and tasks will be modeled as native entities so they can be tightly linked to events and remain consistent across platforms. That means a clear internal data model with stable IDs, timestamps, and explicit relationships, e.g., tasks linked to notes, tasks linked to events, and notes linked to events. From a user perspective, it enables workflows like:

• Turning meeting notes into action items (tasks) while keeping the original note as context.
• Attaching a note directly to a calendar event so the agenda and outcomes live where they’re needed.
• Viewing a project note and immediately seeing related deadlines and scheduled meetings.

This is also what makes offline-first behavior realistic: notes and tasks can remain fully usable without connectivity, and calendar data can be cached and incrementally refreshed.

MVP plan: ship a cohesive loop, then expand

My MVP is intentionally scoped around an end-to-end loop that delivers daily value:

1. Connect calendar provider (Google) and sync events reliably.
2. Normalize and merge events into a single unified calendar feed.
3. Create and manage tasks that appear in the same timeline view.
4. Create notes and link them to events and tasks.
5. Schedule reminders/notifications in a way that’s dependable and doesn’t spam users.

Under the hood, that implies a clean service boundary between identity, credential storage, sync workers, local data storage, and the API surface that clients consume. The API itself will be designed for a unified view (events + tasks) and for linking notes to calendar entries, so clients can render a combined timeline without complicated stitching logic.

What I’m excited to learn (and prove)

This project sits at the intersection of product craft and systems engineering. The “simple UI” users want is backed by hard problems: recurrence expansion, time zone correctness, incremental syncing, conflict resolution, and safe token handling. I’m excited to design those pieces with the kind of disciplined architecture that makes the product feel effortless.

If this goes well, I see a clear path beyond MVP: natural-language entry (“Call with Sam tomorrow at 10”), smarter linking and search, optional team sharing, and higher-level views like “what’s due this week that doesn’t yet have time blocked.”

For now, the focus is on shipping the fundamentals: one place to see the truth of your day, and the context to act on it.