Visions of a Brighter (Calendar) Tomorrow

Automated Calendar Tetris

I talk to a lot of people about productivity and effectiveness at work and one topic seems to be coming up more and more often these days — the craziness of calendars. This is a topic worthy of multiple posts for sure as there are many issues with calendars these days. One big topic is that many people I know simply have too many meetings on their calendar — and not enough time to get work done. But in this post, I want to tackle one in particular — what I sometimes call “Calendar Tetris”.

This is where you need to schedule a meeting with a group of people and there is simply no available time for the meeting. So you begin to look for places where there are only a few conflicts to see if you could move one or two meetings to make space. But which meetings can you effectively move without much delay? The space of possibilities explore in number very quickly but the logic is quite simple. This is exactly the sort of problem that is better solved by computers than by people — which makes me ask why this have either Microsoft or Google done this?

The lack of a solution here actually makes it harder for me to really block time on my calendar, which I think is a great practice. If I need an hour to do real work, I want to put that hour on my calendar so I know I have an hour to do that work. But I don’t really need that hour, I need an hour. If I can move that to make time for a meeting, I’m happy to. But calendars don’t work that way — so I often don’t put those blocks on my calendar at all so I have time for important meetings.

Or worse, sometimes people just book over things on my calendar which they think are less important than their meeting. Sometimes they’re right — sometimes they’re not. Plus, I don’t always notice when this happens — and I really need to move whatever was booked over.

Sometimes there are executive assistants who can work through these issues for you — but it’s often just as frustrating and time consuming for them. And honestly, laborious manual processes that don’t take a lot of judgement are perfectly suited to automation. This doesn’t even take fancy AI/ML techniques! Here’s the hoping someone at Google is paying attention and tackles this (I say Google since we use GSuite, so a MSFT solution doesn’t help me… 😉)

Originally published at https://jeffkeltner.com on March 25, 2021.