Tools I use: Vimcal
I tweeted out the other day after being sick of dealing with calendar back and forth planning about what tools people use. To my delight someone recommended Vimcal and I have been hooked ever since.
The beauty of this tool is that you can grab open days and times AND share a bookable link. It looks something like the below. The joy here is that the age old “argument” of sharing days and times vs. a bookable link are over with a tool like this – its simply both. This is something I have been doing anyways for years, but with a much more manual process.
Using Vimcal
The Magic of Vimcal
Once you hit copy to clipboard you can paste in a plaintext email to SHOW someone your days and times. For those that know me well, my favorite thing is when people share 3 days and 3 times and now I can do so in a much easier way.
Plaintext calendar magic at work
This is something I have wanted to for awhile and it looks like the above with a simple “CMD-A” when using Vimcal. I truncated the link because I don’t want it out there publicly 🙂
Vimcal is currently $15 a month. My unreasonable justification – scheduling something takes 2-4 minutes to reproduce what happens above. So lets go on the high side; 4 minutes. I do between 2-4 of these a day on average, knowing I sometimes spike during peak scheduling times. 4 times a day, 5 days a week, is 80 minutes so about 1.3 hours. 1.3 hours a week. 80 minutes a week times 4 weeks is 320 minutes a month spent scheduling, so 5.3 hours. Assuming I can cut this time in half (which is probably not generous enough) I can SAVE 2.5+ hours. I would like to think my time is worth more than $15 an hour, so the cost is justified. This is certainly a lot to pay for another SaaS tool, but right now its worth it.
I currently pay for tools like Superhuman, and now Vimcal, which is pushing my monthly costs for email and calendars pretty high. Doing some math on time value of money, away from other things (or more work) depending on how you look at it is a good justification.
I tend to get sucked into the productivity software rabbit hole pretty easily, but in this case the switching costs were very low (OAuth with calendars) and the savings was very high (instant keyboard shortcut time savings).
Tags: Tools I Use, Vimcal