How Calendar Software Fails


Virtually everyone uses a calendar for business planning. Many calendar programs are available for sale, yet every one of them ignores the most simple and obvious ways that people want to use calendars. Simply put, a calendar should reflect how people use time to manage their lives. In general, we can divide our time concerns into two types: deadlines and ongoing processes. A deadline is an instant in time when something is due, such as a project milestone. An example of an ongoing process is an overnight business trip. While I'm visiting Chicago for two days, for example, I'll have three meetings with various clients.

Every contemporary calendar program ignores deadlines and ongoing processes, but instead is based on the establishment of appointments. An appointment is a discrete meeting that begins at a certain time. Appointments are an important component of time management, but they are by no means the only one. Not only are other types of calendar entries ignored, but even appointments are misrepresented.

Tracking the start time of meetings is far more important than tracking the end times, yet calendar programs don't differentiate between the two. In the last 30 years, I've initiated and attended thousands of meetings. The starting time of these meetings is extremely important. For most of the meetings, however, the end time is not important, not needed, not specified, and not knowable in advance. Yet in every calendar program I've ever seen, appointments have an end time that must be specified in advance with the same precision, accuracy, and diligence with which the meeting's start time must be specified. The end time is used in precise calculations of availability that cannot possibly be accurate and are a significant distortion of reality. For example, if using a typical calendar program you invite me to a meeting at 3:00 p.m., the program will reject your invitation if I have a 35-minute meeting scheduled at 2:30 p.m. In the real world, I can easily duck out of my previous meeting five minutes early.

Also, none of these programs factor in the time it takes me to get to a meeting. If I need to be across town at 2:00 p.m., I have to head out the door at 1:30 p.m. Should I set the appointment in the program for 1:30 or for 2:00? A well-designed program should figure that out and help guide me to get going on time.

There are quite a few other forms of common time-related entries that are not accommodated. On any given day, I can have a dozen or more projects that are current, while at any given instant I will actually work on only one. The typical calendar program refuses to acknowledge this normal behavior and won't let me enter project-level items. I can't get around the dancing bear.



Inmates Are Running the Asylum, The. Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity
The Inmates Are Running the Asylum Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy &How to Restore the Sanity - 2004 publication
ISBN: B0036HJY9M
EAN: N/A
Year: 2003
Pages: 170

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