First Look: Memochron Plugin
An easy-to-use Obsidian capability to integrate Google Calendar.
Note to readers: I have undertaken significant changes to the Obsidian knowledge management system I call Portfolio (see all posts tagged ‘portfolio’), which is one of the reasons I have been very quiet recently. The arrival of Bases in v1.9.1 of Obsidian has led me to rethink how I had undertaken task and project management in Obsidian. I’ve been waiting for my new approach to settle a bit before writing about it. That post — or posts — will be coming soon.
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Memochron Plugin: Bottom Line First
I came across a mention of Memochron in Obsidian Plugins Showcase by Nuno Campos, who wrote:
MemoChron bridges the gap between personal knowledge management and time-based planning by integrating calendar events with Obsidian, transforming routine scheduling into a comprehensive documentation workflow that captures the full context of your activities.
A bit grandiose, I thought. But I took a look and installed the plugin. After a few days of use, I can say that this is the best Obsidian integration of Google Calendar I’ve seen.
In a nutshell, I’ve used the ‘secret link’ to various Google Calendar calendars, added them to Memochron’s settings, and the calendar events appear in a Memochron sidebar, like this:
As you see, I have two Google Calendar events defined for the fourth of July.
Memochron has one major limitation: the plugin doesn’t provide a way to make changes to the Google events from within Obsidian. However, considering the complexity of what can be done with Google Calendars, I am fine with making necessary changes to the core information in Google events using the Google app. What I really have wanted for a long time is something like Memochron: an easy-to-use presentation of Google events within Obsidian.
Configuration
Here’s the top half of the plugin’s settings:
I have added two Google calendars.
Monday is the first day of my week.
I want both the calendar and agenda views.
30 minute refresh is fine for me. Also, there is a ‘force refresh’ command available.
I don’t need the daily notes file linked in the agenda view, personally. I tested that, and it works. (I don’t think that daily notes should be conflated with calendar events.)
The second half is more interesting, because Memochron supports the creation and editing of Obsidian notes generated from Google calendar events, by clicking on the event in the agenda:
I designated a folder for Memochron notes: ‘00 knowledge/events’. (Actually, I had created that earlier for various experiments in creating and managing events; all failures.)
I did not test the ‘date-based’ folders implementation. It may be helpful if you are generating a lot of event notes.
I chose to have event notes titled with a leading ‘{{date}}’ timestamp in YYYY-MM-DD format (which I use generally) and the event name.
I accepted the default YAML.
I tried to hack the default template for notes by embedding the ‘{{event title}}’ and ‘{{date}}’ into a task, and setting a reminder (in Reminders plugin format) so that I will be reminded of the meeting in Obsidian as well as in Google Calendar. But Memochron doesn’t support 24 hour times in the template language, which Reminders defaults to. There may be a fix for this, either in Memochron providing a template option, or in Reminders. In the meantime, it doesn’t integrate.
I don’t use tags in Obsidian, so I deleted the default tags.
Here’s an example of a Memochron note. I volunteered to help my neighbor, Stephanie, create burgers from a mountain of ground beef for her 4th of July party. I also linked to the party note, as well.
The Notes section of the event note would be a good place to record observations, minutes, or tasks arising from calls or meetings. Note, however, that if you make changes to a Google Calendar event — like changing date, start or end times — a Memochron note created prior to those changes will not be updated automatically. As a result, I am adding pre-event description info into the Google event, and generally only adding material to the Memochron notes during or after the event.
I found one important glitch with creating Memochron notes: multi-day events aren’t really supported in the notes’ creation department. While multi-day events are imported correctly, and display sensibly in the agenda, creating Memochron notes for them doesn’t work. The template variable for event notes don’t support ‘{{start_date}}` and ‘{{end_date}}’. I have added an issue to the Github for the plugin, and it seems like the developer, Michalis Efstratiadis, has been adding features and dealing with issues quite quickly. I bet he’ll fix that glitch quickly.
Final Thoughts
Memochron is a promising tool for pulling in events from Google Calendar and managing notes about them within Obsidian. While it doesn’t support round-trip synching, I can live with that.