Analyzing calendar data

Calendars store events in an .ics file. Web-based calendars like Google Calendar allow you to export your data (either at the event-level or the full calendar-level) as an.ics file. This file can be converted into a CSV, which can then be queried and analyzed in Tableau or a similar tool.

From Wikipedia:

The Internet Calendaring and Scheduling Core Object Specification (iCalendar) is a media type which allows users to store and exchange calendaring and scheduling information such as events, to-dos, journal entries, and free/busy information, and together with its associated standards has been a cornerstone of the standardization and interoperability of digital calendars across different vendors.

Here is a Google Collab notebook which contains a script for converting your calendar’s .ics file to a Pandas data frame before outputting as a .csv.

Once converted into csv, you can think of calendar data as any other geospatial time series data. You have places (physical and virtual) and you have timestamps (start time, end time).

The metadata in a calendar invite, such as event attendees, contains a lot of useful data. For example, you could find out what proportion of your meetings are internal-facing vs customer-facing. If you are in a customer-facing role, you could pull a report of all the customers you met with in a given week and use that to add them on linkedin or update your customer database — either manually or with some automation.

Thanks for reading!