Process driven calendar

A calendar works by putting in special dates which last an hour, or a day, or a week. However, our lives normally require us to intervene with a special process several times. Let me write down a few examples to explain what I mean:

• When attending to a birthday party, you would normally want to bring a present, which has to be decided upon, bought, wrapped, and packed when leaving for the party.
• When attending to a meeting, one should prepare for half an hour, preferrably soon before. Then, the decisions have to be put into emails, new calendar entries and so on – everything has to be followed up in some way.
• When cooking a meal for guests, the guests have to be invited, the goods have to be ordered and bought, then there needs to be time for cooking (depending on the recipe). Afterwards there needs to be time for tidying up.

So when putting anything into a calendar, wouldn’t it be nice to have some help with planning the other dependent actions?

I imagine a collection of processes which work like ical entries, but contain several action items. Each action item has a timing component which can be before another action item (cooking before eating), days before (ordering wine), hours before (buying goods, preparing the meeting), or any time after. They also should have a limit in how early you can do it – you should not buy the meat for the dinner many days in advance. The action items should be tagged with what it is (shopping) so that several action items fall into one category, so when going shopping, goods will be bought for many meals, or bills are paid for many orders… you get the picture. This should not be limited to one person: A process often involves many people (A has to order, B has to pay, C has to do something to it, D has to ship it to the customer).
Also, the calendar needs to know when to place those tagged action items – that’s when it feels a bit more like a normal calendar again. Put in when you want to go shopping, when you want to prepare for meetings, when to do phone calls.
When you add a process to your calendar, here’s what I imagine what should happen: You want to invite guests for a dinner next Saturday. This places a todo into your calendar of deciding what to eat, and a reminder to call the guests in your slot when you do phone calls. You go straight ahead and choose a meal you want to cook (that’s a process too, like ‘Lasagne’). That places the requirements for shopping for the lasagne, the meat, the flour, and the wine. It notices that the time is right (nothing is going to degenerate in your fridge by then), but you have no time arranged for cooking. So the system suggests to you when you can do the cooking – with lasagne this can be as early as two days in advance, just the oven bit has to be right before eating. It finds some spare time slots and lets you choose when you want to cook.

Another good example would be holidays. Think of how many things are involved in that! Asking at work, booking, buying swimwear, checking passports, vaccinating, confirming flights… the list is endless and since it only happens about once a year, forgetting one or two of the above action items can be cause of mayor stress. If the items are placed at the right spots the planning will be a breeze.
A calendar like this will by no means let you stop thinking, but I feel like it would be much more natural to have processes spawn several days, even weeks. By editing the processes after the events (putting in things that went forgotten), those processes become better and will avoid you many headaches.