Welcome to the Behavioral Design Podcast.
I'm one Co host, Samuel Salser, with my other Co host, Eileen
Holtworth. Hey, Eileen.
Hi, that's me. Yeah.
And we're here with a product deep dive talking about pumpkin
lattes. Sam, it's Pumpkin Spice Latte.
OK, it's still not clear that was a fate and I I screwed up as
well. So that was not the plan.
We're actually talking about something different.
We're talking about calendars today, and to talk about that, I
want to 1st ask you, Eileen, how do you manage your time?
Yeah, so first calendar is much more exciting than the pumpkin
spice latte. Some might disagree, but OK,
sure. Sure, sure.
I don't. I don't know any of those
people. How do I manage my time?
I would say too much. Mostly there's like a particular
irony with time management, where if you spend too much of
your time. Managing your time and
interacting with your calendar and and so on you're actually
poorly managing your time and so there's this like definite
backfire and I think that in general I'm I think I'm pretty
good at managing my time but I I do tend towards over managing in
a a sort of unhealthy way. I really like.
I have some bad habits I'm sure what is I am.
I want to dive living here a little bit further, so when you
feel like you steps, step back and you're like, oh, what have I
done? Like why did I spend so much
time obsessing about this thing? What have you been doing?
Have you been like planning something?
Have you been like organizing? Like where do you feel like the
time is being overly spent? Yeah, I no like I think planning
and organizing that's good. I think I'm in a healthy space
there. I think that the sort of.
The day-to-day interaction with my calendar, I feel like there's
a little bit of an obsession that I have there where I do I
it's close to time tracking really rather than planning
because I will in sort of after the fact, you know, some some
event has happened and you know, maybe I didn't do exactly what I
said I was going to do. I'll go back.
And correct the record, which is like, you know, as if it matters
that that I spent 15 more minutes on task A before
switching to task B. Like nobody cares at all.
And like even I don't use that information, it's not there's
there's no use for it. But I still I have this.
Compulsion is sort of like a borderline OCD tendency where I
would just like, I have to like the record has to be right.
Who knows, maybe in five years I'll want to know, like, what
was I doing at, you know, 10:13 AM on, like on that Thursday?
No, it's it's totally ridiculous and I know it's a problem.
Well, the first thing that came to my head when I say that was
that you had watched too much, you know, true crime.
And you know, they always ask you like, what did you do
between these hours On this date?
And you'll be able to say like specifically to the minute you.
Know I will know with 100% confidence what e-mail I was
sending at that minute. OK yeah that that's interesting.
Have you fallen down like 1 rabbit hole that I find myself
when it comes to time is that I'm looking for kind of tools to
solve time management for me. So like I've been desperately
trying to kind of find this kind of magic time management tools,
whether that's like time tracking tools like something
like toggle or something like this.
That kind of effectively where you can like start a timer or
start something and then you save it and you can tag it or
organise it by based on projects or so on and sync it through
your calendar or having like some calendar that's like Cron
or I think is one of Amy or other things like this.
I feel like I still haven't really found a tool to solve the
problems and I think we we spoke about this if few times in the
past. I think we're we're quick to
look for these kind of tools to solve the problem.
But do you do you use multiple calendars or multiple things?
Or or are you use kind of doing things in a very simple way?
Yeah, but overdoing it, yeah. I would say so.
I've I have tried some tools like Reclaim, I've tried with my
calendar, it really did not stick.
It just it felt like I don't. Just an extra, you know, more
planning and organizing whereas my previous workflow.
It's you know maybe not perfect but it didn't add these extra
layers of admin where as I felt like that and even just like
checking another tool to me feels like that is an extra work
and that that time has to be accounted for too.
And I've I I've tried other sort of like scheduling assistants,
basically like AI schedulers and I've I've I there was a time
when I used Calendly to help with scheduling quite a bit.
I found that I. That I more recently haven't
wanted to use it just because it I want to have more control over
my time and be able to say to like really give permission for
other people taking up my time rather than just letting people
sign up whenever they want. And I find that I'm too
scheduled to to use it these days.
But in general, like there was a time when it when it worked
really well. I think if your schedule is not.
You know, quite as full. It can be extremely convenient
to have other people just sign up for a time anytime.
I can definitely relate. Yeah.
I think as as we kind of illustrated, there's a lot of
interesting components to managing time, managing our
calendar and that's what we're kind of going to try to dive
into today. And maybe could you say the same
with Linda Babcock recap? I'm sorry because we spoke to
her episode, came out a week before this one and maybe you
can set the scene of of that plus any other.
I think we have had some. I don't know.
I feel like it comes up a few times.
Yeah, I mean time is everything, right.
So we time is sort of one of those immortal topics that is
always coming up again and again with Linda Babcock we talked
about you know specifically with her expertise in non promotable
tasks and promotable tasks and that ratio between them
basically how you can you can solve that problem or or one way
of solving. The problem of having too many
promotable tasks by using your calendar as a tool.
And so she we came up with with some ideas that you'll you'll
have to listen to the the whole episode for all of them.
But essentially you know you could color code to to
categorize your your NPTS versus your PTS.
Your calendar could actually take an another step further and
stop you if you if you, you know, exceed some threshold of
non promotable tasks you know, stop you and say like no, you've
done. Too much you need to get back to
your actual job. But essentially the idea behind
that was just like to get to this idea of a healthy work work
balance. You just need to plan out your
time and understand you know how much of of your time is going to
these these tasks that further your career versus versus not.
And and I actually think that I, I can't remember if we if we
talked about this at the time but there's.
A way to do this, you know, maybe once, right?
You don't have to do this as a continual process.
You can just right? Yeah, I do some like understand
where you are, do some reflection and then take some
other steps that aren't as heavy-handed as, as, you know,
tracking every single minute of your day.
Yeah, no, I I think that's that's true.
And so with your kind of meticulous tracking of your
time, do you just make sure that it accurate actually represents
what you did? Or do you also like have tags
for things like I I did something non promotable versus
promotable for example? Or how far do you go?
Have I done this personally? No, absolutely not.
No. And I and I haven't done any,
any math at all, any adding up of, you know, how much time am I
spending on this versus that, Like like nothing actually
helpful. You can imagine a version of
this where you learn from your tracking.
That's not where I am currently. But yeah, you could do that.
Would it actually help you? Like I think that's an exercise
worth going through is if you knew because you you know you
probably have a pretty vague idea of how if you're spending
too much time on a a certain kind of thing, if you knew the
the exact numbers, would that be enough to actually help you
focus on the things that matter? I'm not really convinced that
that that that's the right intervention.
Yeah, yeah. It's it's only something that
could potentially be more valuable if it's like the
manager of the team has kind of some general idea of kind of how
people are being asked to contribute rather than like the
people themselves and. Yeah.
But any any time that managers have access to that level of
information, I start to worry that's true.
That is true. But in any other guests that we
had before that we should provide any.
Yeah, I mean, certainly the one, the one that is that comes to
mind most easily is Ashley Willens, right?
She studies time and how to spend it more wisely.
So she we talked a ton about different strategies for
spending time more effectively. One of them I definitely made me
feel proud of myself for for doing is essentially outsourcing
different kinds of the I don't know what you would call other
than chores, right? Like yard work, cleaning, even
meal prep sometimes. Times basically the things that
are not that don't feel like are bringing you that joy to borrow
from from Someone Like You know just pay someone else to do
that. Because you know if if you can't
afford it then that is a a very good use of money.
I also block time for Deep work, like schedule time to do that or
go through to do. You're doing some really good
things there, yeah. Yeah.
I mean, there is some intentionality that I think goes
into my calendar for sure. But in terms of tagging all the
tasks. Oh my gosh, yeah, yeah.
Trying to stay away from that. That's very.
In terms of doing chores, I remember my my uncle, he had
this joke about whenever you're doing kind of like housework or
yard work, you're stealing from a handyman.
It was his kind of thing. It's like basically like you
you're taking money from someone who could, you know, who's been
trained to do it and so. Absolutely, because you're not
doing it well. When I'm pruning the fruit
trees, like I'm not helping the trees, that's, that's for sure.
That's that's a professional. Yeah, I know.
I do think I I think she has some great advice in her as well
actually and that was a great conversation with her and
similar to you, I think the deep work part is the thing that I
personally have been able to sustain quite well for for a few
years and that definitely makes a difference.
Nice. Do we feel like we have kind of
what we need to jump into exploring calendars a bit more
and and kind of how we could ourself improve them?
Absolutely, Absolutely I and you know.
We both think a lot about about time and our calendars and I
think that in general there there's sort of two directions
that you can take the like how to improve the calendar as a
product, right. You can think of like doing more
and better calendar so you know really like getting into the the
tagging and like making things automatic and so on.
Or you can think about like maybe this is not the most
healthy direction maybe we should go towards the the less
like the less calendar version and but but maybe we can like
take a little. A little bit of a deep dive into
into both of these strategies. What do you think?
Yeah, I love that. And then maybe we can end up
with some form of comparable, you know, obviously with all of
our interventions that we kind of explore, the truth is that
they depend on the context of the person who's using them.
And very much the likely truth here is that some people will
love a more, more, more more calendar.
Yeah. Absolutely.
More, more whatever. And some people would would like
the the more scaled down version.
But, but I think The funny thing about this is you, you see
people who are high in in the trade of planfulness, right?
And those are the people who tend to be the ones who are
scheduling and you know, using their calendars maybe too
heavily. But then you look at the people
who are low in planfulness, and those are the people that really
could use more planning, and they would.
With the benefits of of being more organized and this, this
sort of ties to all the benefits of being high in
conscientiousness and and so on. But so, so I think when you
think of individual differences in this space and how
personality falls into it, sometimes the people who are
more drawn to one solution are actually not the ones who need
it the most. Yeah.
And I feel like that's something potentially very much overlooked
in in this category specifically with calendars because it's like
a lot of the calendars that are made are probably made for these
power users that are like craving you know the extreme
plan for us. And then the majority of people
that are just kind of wanting to get by basically, but do so a
little more efficiently and and more effectively.
I don't want to like spend their life kind of like it doesn't
have that strong pull towards that kind of part.
Yeah, doing so that they might be.
Understood. I'd love to know what the
distribution is of of like how people use their calendars.
I'm sure someone could find that data somewhere, but I yeah, it
it's hard to know. I imagine most people to your
point are not over engineering their lives with their
calendars. Most people have a lot of gaps
and like, you know, maybe they have the birthday party on their
calendar, they have the essential meetings, but they're
not, you know, they're not scheduling every little thing
for sure, Yeah. Cool.
OK, so yeah, what do you think? If we were to start with this,
this first direction of of more better calendar, what are some
ways that we could we could solve for that?
Yeah, I guess, yeah, where to start there?
I think there's a lot of things that could be done.
I do think that you mentioned reclaim before and I would say
it might not be perfect for everyone.
But to explain what reclaim tries to do is basically you
kind of gives you give reclaim certain things that you want to
do on a regular basis, maybe that's daily or weekly and so
on. And it kind of puts that into
your calendar and if you add something else in there, it's
quite flexible. So it's kind of like you might
say that you won't have lunch sometime between 12:00 and 2:00
PM and then lunch should be between 30 and 45 minutes.
And then it's going to kind of find a space for your lunch.
But it kind of notices if something happens to kind of
exceed your first half of that time like between 12:00 and 1:00
and then moves your lunch and make sure that you have kind of
some time for lunch in your calendar and so.
But what if you schedule over your whole lunch?
Then what does it do? What's lunch at 4:00 PM, like
no. Then I think it's just I think
it's just keeps lunch there but you become like double booked
effectively if I remember weekly I think you can and this is a
little bit of tricky part where reclaim is not perfect because
it kind of required a little bit of over engineering like you
could like have four or five levels of how hardcore you want
to keep a certain type of event. So I think if you have like
something like level like the highest level, it's going to
stay there whatever you do. But if you have a lower level,
it's going to be moved to like 4:00 PM or something but it.
Doesn't block a meeting from being scheduled.
It will still let you do that and just say you have a meeting
and it could depends on it depends on what you use and how
you set it up. So, so basically if you use
Calendly it would block like because it wouldn't show that
you have something in the way and so on.
But obviously if you want to manually add a meeting, it's
nothing like slap away your hand, stop it.
So So what I want to come to there is that I do think what I
really appreciated with Reclaim is basically two things like one
is that it adds automatically breathing space after all of my
meetings that has some form of like a call in them.
So effectively it's called like decompress or something I think
in the in the calendar settings. And so it adds like 10 minutes
afterwards as a bumper, like as an extra thing and I've noticed
that's been really useful to is ensuring that I'm unlikely to
have like back-to-back to back. Meetings or something And how
how does that work with the timing?
Because I'm, I'm thinking of a a way that some people do this is
by scheduling shorter meetings, right?
So you have a meeting from you know. 205 to to 2:30 and then
you have those 5 minutes there. But if you have your meeting
from 2:00 to 2:30 and then you have another, you know the next
person wants to start their meeting at 2:30.
But you have a buffer. Do they?
Does it not let them schedule something until 2:35?
Or how does the buffering interact with the actual times
that you're available? Yeah, so just basically whenever
you schedule an event is add second event afterwards that
lasts for let's say 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes depending
how how you set it up. And then if you happen to have
some like Calendly or something else, it will just look like
you're then booked for those extra 15 minutes as well.
And so you'll be forced to again like you said, you could also in
Calendly within that setting have a similar setup so that you
can have say that you know, two people can't look back-to-back.
So it's a very similar thing in some ways in terms of like kind
of in a way defaulting a breathing space within your in
your day. And so I do think any type of
calendar tool that supports kind of in a way defaulting you to
not be having back-to-back meetings for example is doing
something good. So that that I think will be
like the first thing that I think has there's a good element
of that in any good calendar tool or calendar solution is
kind of like forcing you or making it really hard for you to
schedule these back-to-back meetings.
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
And and I I'm sure there's a a small barrier of people reacting
or not being accustomed to strange meeting times, right.
Like, oh, I'm OK, we're meeting at 2:40.
That's a little weird. But like, OK and and it's and I
think, I think maybe that's a benefit of outsourcing to
technology too because you know it's like.
You're not the one making up the weird time.
It's the calendar that says that says that's when you're
available, right? Whereas if you were to propose
to someone in real life, hey, are you available to chat
tomorrow at 2:40 PM? They'd be like, what?
No, but 2:30 would be would be fine.
So yeah, I think that in that way it's it makes it easier,
right, to get around that more, more human tendency.
Yes, I think that is something that's certainly been
appreciated. And I think the second part of
something like reclaim is then having what they call habits
basically like certain kind of events or things that you want
to have on your calendar every day or certain days of the week
and it's going to find a way to kind of schedule it in.
And so that's where I was talking about before where it
can be certain, you know levels of how hardcore is it going to
protect your lunchtime or whatever it is.
But it does make it so that when we talk about deep work, for
example, I have it so that it's always going to try to have
between 9:00 and 11:00 in the morning for me as kind of focus
time. And you know, it's it makes it
easier for me because I kind of also then I could delete that
whole event and schedule it in a meeting, but it just feels very
painful to like delete that kind of sacred time for me.
And of course there's a lot of ways to do that as well.
You don't have to do that to reclaim.
You can just put a recurring event in, for example, and so
on. But again, in this case, we
would reclaim it just kind of has that flexibility as well.
So it's kind of like it just so if I happen to have a doctor's
appointment at 9:15, it then bumps my deep work kind of a
little bit after. So it's between 10:00 and 12:00
instead of suddenly. So, yeah, I guess, I guess
that's something I appreciate. But yeah, I don't know what you
think. Well, it's great that your deep
work is, is at that time. I think there's there's research
supporting putting your deep work in the morning.
But, but a lot of people spend their, you know, what did you
say, 9 to 11 or at least like, you know, you know, first thing
in the morning like when you have the most energy and ability
to focus, they spend that time doing things like responding to
emails and and that's really. You know not the optimal way to
spend your time in terms of the the time of day.
I think if we if we were designing this this new calendar
it would actually maybe nudge you to have your deep like it.
It would understand the types of activities that you're
scheduling on your calendar and actually help you put them at
the right part of the day and and discourage you from doing
e-mail first thing in the morning and encourage you to
have that deep work well first. Like encourage you to have deep
work at all but but then encourage you to have it.
At the right time. Yeah, I really like that
actually. Yeah, I guess it'd be
interesting to think about how how it can also kind of like
potentially it'd be interesting to to kind of train someone into
deep work as well. I think it's it's something we
could kind of benefit from. You know, if now I'm imagining
kind of this again like I have fetishizing of tools in in my
mind in general. So it's like now I'm imagining
this tool that's like a merge of something like a Pomodoro timer
and a calendar and all these things that's kind of like
saying like, hey, you know, maybe you can start deep working
in the morning and it's easy. You start with setting a
Pomodoro timer of like 20 minutes or 30 minutes and then
that can be your focus for today.
And then you can expand that time and OR cycle.
So you can have like one or two cycles today or this week and
then you can kind of expand to maybe 3 or so four depending on
your deep work, how much you want to go for.
It has to integrate with your entire desktop so that during
your deep work time, like your focus mode is turned on as
you're on Do Not Disturb, like all of your apps are, are
inaccessible. You can't even access social
media if you wanted to. Your e-mail doesn't even work
like like this. But on the other hand, when I
think of a world in which this is the case, I think, wow, this
is a terrifying sort of Black Mirror esque over engineering.
And I don't want that either, right.
Yeah, It's really I think how I usually categorize these kind of
things because I've been doing some interventions when it comes
to working in digital health, when it comes to people managing
their time with also with kind of productivity and also some
more clinical settings. But I think about it as kind of
solutions that are either kind of fixes or skill based sort of
say. And I think there's certain
fixes that maybe could be kind of built in through let's say
slightly improved calendar functionalities.
But then as you say, I think probably balancing that you
probably want to also then train some skills that people can
learn themselves instead of like you just imagining the calendar
is going to do all of that for you and it's going to be this
kind of all-encompassing, I don't know, like super, super
mind for you to think for you and do for you very scary
quickly. Yeah, it's true.
But I also yeah, I do think there are other ways that.
Calendar or or some sort of like you know time management
technology in this vein could give you some some more smart
suggestions source to of ways to spend your time like you know,
looking at the content of your calendar rather than just saying
you know there's a thing here, there's a thing here like you
know, not treating everything exactly the same, but.
But you know, in that vein of do your deep work in the morning
essentially looking at, you know if we go into you know the
version of tagging right, where the, you know, presumably
machine learning algorithm understands you know what you're
doing and tells you, hey, it's it seems like you're.
You're spending too much time looking at and applying to jobs
on LinkedIn. Maybe.
You know, maybe you could you You'd be more likely to find a
job through your weak ties, and maybe you should spend some more
time networking, right? This, this is a more effective
strategy for landing a job and like like really like actually
smart recommendations rather than just letting you fall into
this pit of, you know, sort of. Hold applying to jobs, that sort
of thing. Yeah that is interesting.
And I guess these days it wouldn't require more than kind
of well it is to say this but but basically with some form of
let's say language model basically taking the event as a
prompt and kind of fitting it in in some ways where it's kind of
like based on this prompt consider you know alternative
ways to spend this time or and so on.
I guess it would help or always the challenge with any type of
smart suggestions I guess or AI is kind of establishing
contexts. So how to make sure that it's,
it knows that you have. Yeah.
What's your goal effectively? Yeah.
Yeah, I think yeah, that is often the problem is to to
function well, you need a lot of understanding of what the
person's motivation is and you very rarely know that.
You only know what's there and you don't get that feedback
unless people are telling you. And then it's a lot of work to
get people to tell you that. Then you get into the the the
realm of over engineering and just too much friction.
You're not getting enough benefit from it and that's I
feel like that is the weakness of the more calendar, the
calendar that does more is that it's a little bit like some form
of similar to tracking burden. It's kind of like requires some
level of like extra input perhaps where you know, for it
to really do wonders for you at the start of the day, you might
have to interact with it a bit. Then you have to say, like,
here's my goal of the day and here's my most important to do's
and so on. And it'll be like, thanks,
here's some recommendations for, you know, like I've set up your
calendar now to succeed and and obviously that doesn't sound
like too much input and work. But then as life happens to
people, I think a lot of people are kind of faced with a reality
where they're kind of used for getting to interact with their
calendar until it's like 11 or 12.
Yeah, and they're like, but yeah, when we still think about
this more calendar the the better calendar, is there
anything else that we could do there?
We haven't talked about time blocking.
I know it's a very big kind of wave within this space, like a
lot of people are are in one way or another time blocking.
We can't indirectly talk about that in some ways.
But have you explored that? Do you have any opinions about
time blocking? I'm not sure what you mean by
time blocking because I feel like that is what we talked
about with with the deep work or or.
What do you mean turning your To Do List into your calendar?
More like fully where the idea that you don't have a separate
To Do List like your To Do List is your calendar and you you
know in the sort of your. Day or something You kind of.
Absolutely hate it, Yeah. So I like like many people who
obsess over their time. Once read many years ago, this
book by David Allen called Getting Things Done and he lays
out a a process for basically collecting all of your to DOS.
Not ever putting them on your calendar, but having time to to
to go through them and if there's anything that you know
takes, you know, I forget under 5 minutes or three minutes or
something, you don't even add it to your list.
You just go ahead and and immediately do it.
And I think that given the energy that it takes to to try
and estimate how much each of these tiny little tasks is going
to take. It is much easier to just have
you know maybe in an hour or something blocked for go through
your to do's and and do that and so that's that's what I tend to
do where I have the have the list in my I use the Things app.
I'm giving you too much information about my my
workflow. And so you you go through your
things, app you, you know you, you knock everything out.
But but those things don't have to live on your calendar because
then you actually are over engineering at the extreme where
you have, you know then you're spending all of your time
managing your time and that's not sustainable.
So someone who's in the time blocking camp, it might like say
that the only true way to really take accountability for your to
do's is to put a time estimate and put it into your day.
Like you prioritize it that way, you know it lives on your
calendar and so you're kind of taking accountability that if I
have put in my calendar, I'm going to do this thing for an
hour, that's what I'm going to do and then I can adjust and so
on. But it's like, do you feel like
that's a reasonable thing? Depends how large the task is.
For the million small things that would be insane.
For, you know, I want to make sure that I make progress on
writing a book. And so you you put, you know, I
mean, that feels like deep work to me, but, you know, whatever.
To me, that's like you're 9:00 to 9:00 to 11:00 AM, you know,
every, every day or every other day where you're just you're,
you know, you've reserved that time for that.
Yeah, that's that is for sure a good thing.
I think that's, you know, you can't be too religious about it
because things come up and you have to be able to be flexible
and adapt when when that doesn't work out.
But yeah, I think that that is one way to ensure that.
That that priority is actually prioritized in your time.
Yeah. So another thing that is
interesting with with this calendar is that day around, I
think with non promotable tasks. I think what came up with all
was meetings and we have I guess talked a little about meetings.
But would you want a calendar to, like, actively challenge you
on in terms of like, are you really supposed to have this
meeting or, you know, challenge the person trying to book a
meeting with you? And it's like, hey, Eileen is
actually much more busy than you maybe kind of assume booking a
time for talking about this seemingly important, unimportant
thing? Like, do you really need to do
this or can you send an e-mail to Eileen instead?
How much do you want your calendar to kind of work for you
to reduce meeting times? Well yeah.
Well, I don't know that I want to e-mail either, but this
e-mail client and calendar client battling against the
shadow. Like sending, you know, doesn't
want to do this, yeah. Totally, totally.
So this this reminds me of my favorite person on the Internet
who who I know we've talked about before.
Soren Iverson has has made all sorts of.
Unhinged designs that that often get at this idea of does this
meeting really need to happen? Like tell people how much this
meeting costs in order to, you know, you get that little shock
effect of oh like is this really worth, you know, $6000 for this
half an hour or you know, however much it is?
Yeah, and like allowing people to to vote to cancel the meeting
and really like asking why. Yeah.
Do you really need an all hands or like, can you at least tell
people why you're calling them all together?
Yeah, I think this is an interesting idea.
I'd be open to trying it. All of these, all all of these
designs that are meant to be, I think in many ways meant to be.
Jokes, I think could actually work in real life for maybe
people like me. I like them too.
I think it's good, yeah. And I but I also saw this like
it's almost like the counter meme recently where someone
says, you know, you know, this meeting could have been an
e-mail and the other person says, well, I did send you 5
emails that didn't respond to and that's why we're having this
meeting. There you go.
As it speaks this kind of thing you were mentioning before of
like, yeah, we're I think context wise we are a little bit
overwhelmed managing both emails and calendars and it's just it's
hard to really feel like you're succeeding with that kind of, I
don't know, we just too much pressure on both ends and it's
solving for one might like creating more problems on the
other end and and so on. And yeah, it's hard.
OK. And before we wrap up this more
expensive calendar, do you think we've covered some of the main
ideas here, what we could do or it's anything else that you want
to kind of bring up as like something that could be
interesting to, to add to this more, you know the more
calendar? I think there there's one aspect
and it's the social aspect that I feel like is missing from the
calendar as as it's currently designed or any calendar that I
can think of, right you. I mean, you can always invite
someone to do a meeting, right? And that's on you to decide who
and when and where and so on. But there's nothing.
Built into the calendar to encourage that social
interaction and and especially when it comes to accountability,
right. You put something on your
calendar, it's really easy to ignore it when it's just you and
the calendar, it's like nobody else sees that it's there.
So you could put on your calendar as a completely
hypothetical example. This isn't true for me at all,
but you could put your, you know.
Your daily exercise on the calendar and just ignore it
every day, right. It's scheduled every day.
But do you do it like, like, not?
Not necessarily. And does anyone know?
Probably not. But just imagine that your
calendar was integrated with your fitness tracker, for
example. And so it knew.
It knew you had your daily yoga on the calendar and you didn't
do it. I see that like, you know, you
didn't move anymore. You didn't get off the couch at
all, right? And so once, once.
The your, you know, whatever this ecosystem is has detected
that then the calendar can, you know can help you create some
intervention tools if this is something that's important to
you, right. If you say it is my goal to
actually do this and I'd like some help, then the calendar
can, you know, suggest that you invite an accountability to, to
you know, to actually work out together during that time so
that you know someone knows if you're not and you know they're
also there to show up and and do it with you.
So that sort of thing, I think could be really.
Really helpful. Yeah, that is interesting
because I I remember you mentioned with your watch that
with your fitness watch you've had some support in terms of
accountability. Would I think your maybe your
sister or or some family members you feel like it would work
equally good if it was on your calendar or better or you feel
like how would you compare those two type of accountability?
I think having a specific time helps in a in a certain way
because you know if that thing has happened or not by a
specific deadline. Whereas if you're just in
general trying to exercise every day, it's easier to miss.
But if you have something scheduled on the calendar and
it's like a meeting, you know that you don't, you hadn't shown
up for the meeting. So I think there's there's like
a something more tangible about it being on the calendar that
goes. Above and beyond just the like
sharing of activity and the updates and and so on, it's it's
it's really easy to miss something that didn't happen
that isn't like planned or scheduled in any like very
specific way. Yeah, that's fair.
OK. So then wrapping up, kind of
summarizing what a more calendar could look like.
It could have some form of establishing an understanding of
what your goals are and maybe trying to support you in better
structuring your day based on those goals or giving you some
advice or smart suggestions to kind of more effectively
spending your time. It might have some form of like
I guess better defaults around ensuring that certain meetings
are like capped or that you have a space after the meetings and
stuff like that. We talked about again having had
functionality run meetings specifically kind of
incentivizing people to cancel them if they are not that
important and and then we're talking about accountability.
Yeah. What do you feel like there's
more calendar? Does it seem appealing to you or
are you going to try to? If it was there today, would you
would you start using? It.
I would definitely try it. I would definitely try it.
I still have this this something inside me that that.
That really cringes at at the over engineering of it all and I
think there are a lot of downsides to having too much on
your calendar, right. So the the more often results in
a very full looking calendar. If you have everything that you
want to do in your day on the calendar that that like, you
know the visceral feeling of looking at a calendar that has
everything blocked off is just. So stressful and I think
contributes to this feeling of time scarcity that of course we
know from Lori Santos and and many others who are studying
happiness and well-being like this can really, really take a
hit. And when I look at my calendar
and it's so full, I have this terrible feeling of not having
control over my day and my time and.
Like, I don't even feel like I have the the autonomy to take a
break, right. Like if I wanted to take a walk
or it's like if that's not scheduled in my calendar, I
can't do it because everything, you know, everything is all
ready. Every minute is accounted for.
And so I think that's definitely a big downside of the the the
more better calendar which which leads me to think you know maybe
we should consider the the second direction of less
calendar sort of freeing people from from the the shackle.
Of you know of the calendar. Right.
And what what does the last calendar look like?
It's it's kind of operating based on more built in
limitations. I have no idea what is it's it's
throwing away the calendar it's it's horrible because we rely on
our calendars for so many things.
But I think that the less product focused view and maybe
the more philosophical view when I think about this comes from
Oliver Burkman. And so I I know, like this is a,
I'm a very big fan of his book 4000 Weeks.
And when I read this you know he he talks all about how we put so
much energy into being productive and managing our time
and we just are afraid to face this reality that is very, very
true that our time is so scarce and limited and you cannot
possibly accomplish all the things that you want to
accomplish in life. And so the the solution to this
is to basically just let go. Like if if stop trying to master
your time because you're you're not going to do it and you're
making yourself miserable by trying.
And so I think that his suggestions of you know instead
of trying to get everything done and, you know and and work all
the time spend your free time with your friends and your
family and volunteering and hobbies, that sort of thing that
like actually brings you more joy.
And you don't actually have to plan every minute when you're
doing that either, right. Like you can have a a general
like Saturday afternoon. I'm going to, you know, spend
some time. I'm I'm going to go over to blah
de Blah's house. But it doesn't.
How does the calendar promote this from a product perspective?
I'm not sure. I think this might just go back
to helping people, helping people let go.
Yeah, but I remember I actually talking about Oliver Burkman, I
took his, I think it's called like a course on productivity,
the the waking up app and it's kind of like the.
And the productivity course and and how you describe it, it's
kind of like starting with that this is not going to be your
typical productivity course. It's going to do kind of
opposites in many ways of of trying to focus not so much like
maximizing every moment in terms of being as you know doing as
much as possible, but more better able at being maybe for
example mindful about what matters and and and spending the
time in in a more thoughtful and meaningful way.
So I did. They will enjoy that too.
And I do think a calendar, you know could potentially involve
some some elements of like supporting maybe instead of
trying to be a smart calendar, just trying to make you smart
like trying to kind of prime you to think a little more to take
space to reflect or. Do things that are not
productive? How would the calendar do that?
It would like create fake meetings and then it would then
remove them being like a little bit like Laura Santos style.
Like actually take this 30 minutes and go for a walk
instead and think about, you know, what do you really value
in life and and how? How will you make this afternoon
something important for you, you know?
Yeah, that. Yeah, that's nice.
Yeah. I mean, it gets that this, this
reality that we can't just throw the calendar away.
We have to have a calendar. But what does it do for us and
how does it actually help us spend our time more wisely?
I think we've found it. Yeah, yeah, maybe.
Yeah. I'd be interested to hear what
what people think. And one thing we didn't cover
too much is that we haven't covered the kind of more.
Call it cognitive bias. View of what a calendar could do
in that we talk about sometimes planning fallacy.
We talk about some other things like that where you could
imagine like a super kind of someone is super into the hype
of cognitive bias or design. A calendar would really focus a
little bit more about like what contributes to planning fallacy.
How do you how could a calendar reduce that risk?
What are other kind of? This is really into time or
decision making regarding time. Yeah like having having a
multiplier. If you put if you think
something in your time blocking is you think it's going to take
an hour. Actually give them an hour and a
half, for example. Yeah, but I don't know.
Does that seem something that you think would be valuable?
No, I don't. I don't think I want my calendar
to override my time management decisions.
Yeah, yeah, I think. You know a the last calendar
that I think would work well for me is some some calendar just
kind of focus on some key principles and trying to
reinforce some some like good habits on a daily basis.
So that could be, for example, you know, as you say, like
training me to spend the first two hours of my day in deep work
rather than in kind of switching between Slack to e-mail, to
LinkedIn and and so on and also maybe.
Training me to have, like, a shutdown ritual, like a little
bit too was the name Cal Newport.
And talking about the idea of, you know, having a shutdown
ritual where you kind of really switch off and you kind of shut
down and disconnect from your work calendar at a certain time
every day. I think that will be the last
calendar that I think will be valuable for me.
Yeah, Awesome. Well, I think we've solved the
calendar. What do?
You think? Yeah, yeah, maybe.
But it was fun to talk about it. Definitely.
Fun to to discuss all things time in calendar.
Yeah. So maybe I'll just leave us with
a quote here from Annie Dillard. She says that how we spend our
days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
So let's continue to explore this idea of how we can spend
our days better. And hopefully this has been
interesting in terms of some new thoughts around what a calendar
you could do to help us with that.
But yeah, if you have some thoughts, if you want to reach
out, e-mail podcast@haveaweekly.com, share
your thoughts with us. And yeah, as always, thanks for
stopping by. And thanks for supporting the
podcasts. Last words from you, Elaine.
What's next on your calendar? I need to call my sister to do
that yoga workout. OK.
Time to wrap up another episode of the Behavioural Design
Podcast. We hope you enjoyed the show.
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