Google Calendar + deariary: turn meetings into memories
Your calendar is the most honest record of how you spend your time. Every meeting, every appointment, every blocked hour is there, timestamped and organized. Scroll back three months and you can reconstruct where you were on any given day.
But a calendar is an itinerary, not a diary. It tells you that you had a 1-on-1 with your manager at 2pm. It does not tell you that the conversation was about switching teams, that you felt relieved afterward, or that you went for a long walk before your next meeting because you needed to think. The event title says “1:1 / Manager.” The day was so much more than that.
deariary bridges the gap. It reads your calendar events and weaves them into a diary entry alongside everything else that happened that day. The schedule becomes the backbone of a story, not just a list of time slots.
What a calendar forgets
A Google Calendar entry is structured data: title, time, duration, location, attendees. That structure is useful for planning. It is almost useless for remembering.
Here is what fades even when the calendar event remains:
- The mood of a meeting. A “Team Sync” can be a routine check-in or a tense conversation about layoffs. The calendar entry is identical either way.
- The space between events. Your best thinking often happens in the gaps: the 30-minute break where you solved a problem in your head, the lunch where you caught up with a colleague. These moments have no calendar entry.
- Context for why you were there. Three months from now, you will see “Dentist” on your calendar. You will not remember that it was the follow-up after a root canal, that you were nervous, or that the receptionist remembered your name.
- What happened after. The offsite ended at 5pm. What you remember about that day is the dinner afterward, the conversation that ran until midnight. The calendar stopped tracking your day at 5pm.
A diary captures what a calendar cannot: the texture between the appointments.
What deariary collects from Google Calendar
When you connect Google Calendar, deariary reads your events for the previous day through your calendar’s secret iCal URL. It collects:
- Event title: the name of each event on your calendar
- Start and end time: when the event began and ended
- Duration: calculated from start and end time, so the diary can distinguish a 15-minute check-in from a 3-hour workshop
- Location: if you added a location to the event (office name, restaurant, “Zoom”, etc.)
- Description: the event description, if one exists (optional and often empty)
- All-day events: holidays, birthdays, travel days, and other full-day markers
deariary uses this information as context for your diary entry. The LLM sees that your morning had a dentist appointment, your afternoon had three back-to-back meetings, and your evening was free. That temporal structure helps it describe the rhythm of your day, not just the events.
What deariary does NOT collect
- No attendee information. The iCal feed does not include attendee names or email addresses. deariary sees your events, not who else was invited.
- No ability to create, edit, or delete events. deariary only reads the iCal feed. It cannot modify your calendar in any way.
- No attachments or linked documents. If a calendar event has a Google Doc or a Zoom recording attached, deariary does not access those files.
- No recurring event rules. deariary sees each individual occurrence, not the recurrence pattern.
You can revoke access at any time by resetting your calendar’s secret iCal URL in Google Calendar settings. Once reset, the old URL stops working immediately.
From time slots to a readable day
Here is where the difference becomes clear. Say you had a day with a morning dentist appointment, a lunch with a friend, an afternoon of back-to-back work meetings, and an evening cooking class.
On Google Calendar, that is four colored blocks on a timeline. Useful for scheduling. Useless for remembering.
deariary reads those events and writes something like:
Your morning started with a dentist appointment in Shibuya. Afterward you met Yuki for lunch at the ramen place near the station. The afternoon was packed: a design review, a sprint planning session, and a quick sync with the marketing team about the launch timeline. You wrapped up the workday early and made it to your cooking class, where the theme was homemade pasta.
One paragraph. The structure of the day is there, the pace is there, and when you read it back in three months, the details will unlock memories that no calendar entry could.
Calendar events as the skeleton of your diary
Google Calendar is unique among deariary’s integrations because it provides temporal structure. GitHub tells deariary what you coded. Slack tells it what you discussed. But Google Calendar tells it when things happened and in what order.
This matters because a diary is fundamentally a story about a day, and stories need sequence. “You had three meetings and then went to the gym” reads differently from “You went to the gym and then had three meetings.” The first sounds like a long day that needed relief. The second sounds like an energized start. Google Calendar provides that sequence naturally.
When combined with other integrations, the calendar becomes the skeleton that everything else hangs on. The Slack conversation happened between your 10am and 11am meetings. The GitHub commits cluster in the quiet afternoon after your last call ended. The diary entry reads like a day, not a collection of data points, because the calendar gives it a timeline to follow.
The all-day events you will appreciate later
All-day events are easy to overlook. They sit as thin banners at the top of your calendar: a public holiday, someone’s birthday, the first day of a trip.
In a diary, these markers carry weight. Six months from now, reading “It was a national holiday, so you had the day off” immediately changes how you interpret the rest of the entry. A slow morning with coffee and a long walk reads differently on a Tuesday versus a holiday. The birthday banner reminds you that you called your mom, or that you forgot to.
If you already add travel days, personal milestones, or reminders as all-day events, they automatically enrich your diary with context you would otherwise lose.
Google Calendar alone vs. with other integrations
A calendar-only diary gives you the structure of your day. That is already more than most people have. But it reads like an annotated schedule.
Add other integrations and the entries come alive:
Google Calendar only:
You had a team meeting at 10am, followed by a 1-on-1 with your manager at 11:30. The afternoon was open. In the evening, you had dinner plans at 7pm.
Google Calendar + Slack + GitHub:
Your morning started with the weekly team meeting, where the discussion focused on the upcoming deadline. During your 1-on-1 with your manager, you talked about the project timeline (your colleague mentioned in Slack afterward that the scope might shrink). You spent the open afternoon deep in code, pushing several commits to fix the authentication flow. By evening you had wrapped up and headed out for dinner with friends. The group chat had been debating the restaurant all week, and you finally settled on the izakaya near the park.
The first entry is a schedule. The second is a day.
On the Free plan you can connect one integration, which is enough to try Google Calendar on its own. Upgrading to Basic (up to 5 integrations) lets you combine your calendar with the rest of your day. See pricing on deariary.com for details.
When the calendar is empty
Some days your calendar is clear. No meetings, no appointments, no events. These are often the best days: unstructured time where you follow your curiosity, take a long walk, or spend the afternoon reading.
On those days, deariary has no calendar data to work with. If you have other integrations connected, they carry the entry. A calendar-free day with lots of Slack conversations and some GitHub activity still produces a rich diary. If Google Calendar is your only integration, the entry will be short.
That is fine. An empty calendar day in your diary is a signal too. When you look back over a month, the contrast between packed days and open ones tells you something about the pace of your life that you would not notice otherwise.
Setting it up
Connecting Google Calendar to deariary takes about two minutes:
- Go to app.deariary.com
- Open Settings and find the Integrations section
- Click Google Calendar
- In a separate tab, open Google Calendar settings and find the “Secret address in iCal format” for the calendar you want to connect (under “Integrate calendar” for each calendar)
- Copy the iCal URL and paste it into deariary
That is it. The next morning, your diary will include your calendar events from the previous day. No OAuth prompts, no browser extensions, no API tokens to manage.
If you want to include multiple calendars (say, a personal one and a work one), you can add each calendar’s iCal URL separately. Many people start with their personal calendar only and add others once they see the result.
What surprised us
We have been running deariary with Google Calendar connected since early development. A few observations stood out.
The rhythm of a day is the first thing you forget and the most satisfying to recover. You forget whether the meeting was before lunch or after. You forget that Tuesday had five hours of free time while Wednesday was wall-to-wall calls. The diary preserves these rhythms, and re-reading them brings back the feeling of the day more reliably than any single detail.
Location data adds an unexpected layer. If you add locations to your events (even just “office” or “home” or a restaurant name), the diary reads more like a travelogue. “You started the morning at home, headed to the office for an afternoon of meetings, and ended up at a cafe in Daikanyama for dinner.” Without locations, the same day reads as a list of events. With them, it reads as movement through a city.
All-day events are more useful than they seem. We almost overlooked them during development. But entries that start with “It was a three-day weekend” or “Day 3 of your Osaka trip” immediately set the tone for everything that follows. If you are not already using all-day events for trips and holidays, it is worth starting.
Your Google Calendar already records where you spend your time. deariary turns that schedule into a diary you will want to revisit. The meetings become anchors, the gaps become context, and the day becomes a story instead of a timeline.
