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You have arrived at the web home of Noah Brier. This is mostly an archive of over a decade of blogging and other writing. You can read more about me or get in touch. If you want more recent writing of mine, most of that is at my BrXnd marketing x AI newsletter and Why Is This Interesting?, a daily email for the intellectually omnivorous.

May, 2011

The Problem with Calendars

The problem with current calendar design and the impact on scheduling behavior.
Frequently I don't realize how interesting an idea is until I find myself repeating it six months later. That's the case with this post by Mike Monteiro about calendar design. In it he argues that the whole idea of scheduling meetings for people based on the availability in their calendar drives a very bad behavior, mainly assuming that just because something isn't scheduled that the person is free. As he puts it, "'I'm adding a meeting' should really be 'I'm subtracting an hour from your life.'" What if your calendar worked the opposite way? All time was filled by default and people had to extract from your day when scheduling things. This would move the onus to make a case for the meeting to the scheduler rather than the schedulee. I can even imagine taking it a step further and adding a set of prompts as the person schedules asking if this meeting is really important and whether it really needs to be an hour. In general it highlights a real problem we all face, though: We let software dictate the way we behave rather than vice-versa. If you use iCal you probably have lots of one hour meetings, not because they need to be an hour, but because that's the default amount of time a new event has and people's tendency is to no adjust that.
May 19, 2011
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Noah Brier | Thanks for reading. | Don't fake the funk on a nasty dunk.