Spending and planning your time is a mental proces that has very little to do with typing things into a calendar.
A calendar is a great tool for organizing your appointments and a reminder to go to a certain meeting.
But as soon as you try to couple it with being something else, you are not really trying ro solve the real challenge.
If you too much shit to do, a calendar wont fix that. If your meeting are fucked because people are badly prepared, a calendar wont fix that. If you have to many appointments with your parents in law, your calendar wont fix that.
A calendar is a tool that should be fixed. Don't start to fuck around making it something else.
I have seen people use their calendar as project tools for assignments. FFS - use a tool that is actually made for that.
And so on...
A month is too long of a span. I think optimizing the next week, or next 3 days, is much more concrete and beneficial. Its long enough to shuffle things around, and short enough to make realistic goals and to do lists.
No doubt about that :)
> Spending and planning your time is a mental proces that has very little to do with typing things into a calendar....
I disagree with this statement and all that follows. I'm of course, biased, as a founder of a calendar-related startup. I have no vision of trying to convince you otherwise
But for other folks reading this and nodding their head I'd ask them to consider what you're saying: "spending and planning your time is a mental process". Hmm... I suppose you're trying to point out that people have to choose how they spend their time, and you are totally correct. A tool can't automatically make you a better version of yourself.
But also ask yourself, without looking at your calendar, how many meetings are have you currently committed yourself to for the next three weeks, how many commitments to your family, and how much free time do you have leftover? Is that more or less than the commitments that you made to your colleagues (eg: write that strategy doc), to your family members (eg: build that shed), and to yourself (eg: exercise)?
The reality is very few people can do that without consulting their notes, calendars, email, todo lists, project management tools, etc. So it's reasonable that people might also want visual aids to figure out where their time is going and help them be more strategic with their time, pulling disparate sources together and presenting them alongside the place where things tend to me the most fixed: meetings.
Very few tools are for everyone, and calendar blocking clearly doesn't align with your mental model. But I think your tone and language is misplaced and doesn't empathize with the millions of people in the world who benefit from calendar-style time blocking aids.
I wish you all the luck finding a process that does work for you.
Couldn't agree more. People > Process, both ways around.
That said I think a lot of Google Calendar based tooling needs improvement so good on them for trying and I hope they move the meter in a positive direction.
Looking forward to bring something delightful and with a fresh perspective to guide that process.
When I see something like this, I get the impression that the people who made it are looking to squeeze every last penny out of their customers once the product is popular enough. I don't get the impression that they are a group of people that are looking to build a sustainable (but customer-friendly) business model around an idea they are passionate about.
It's unprofessional but simultaneously reeks with a sense of uber-corporate detachment. Something rubs me the wrong way about this and based on the other comments I'm clearly not alone.
This page just kind of pokes at things everyone's frustrated about without offering a solution. But, as The Mom Test points out, there are lots of things people are kind of unhappy with, but are unwilling to pay for. I think the example they use are shoelaces: "Are you tired of bending down to tie your shoes? Having to stop in the middle of the street to re-tie them? Feeling your shoelaces wear out over time? Getting stuff stuck in there?"
Maybe, but are you actually gonna pay for a shoelace alternative? Probably not.
This page is that. It makes some sweeping statements about how work should be intentional and peaceful, and says "we're gonna solve it with a calendar", without offering any details about what that calendar is actually going to do.
If they had some screenshots, they could learn something about how their users engaged with the product. Saying vaguely positive-sounding things ("Rise is different than your current calendar, because instead of starting with meeting invites from others, it starts with you.") doesn't teach them anything.
The problem is that the startup and the consumers have totally different goals. Misleading marketing is always better for the company than consumers. And it really does seem misleading in this case, even implying internationally acclaimed design! There’s a lot of “Rise is” rather than “We hope Rise will be.” That’s why everyone’s getting confused.
It's not a task list, but that's a problem for Trello or something, not a calendar. (Outlook has a task list, but I'm not a big fan of it). Anything that doesn't involve meeting with other people or me being in a different location for a period of time doesn't go in a calendar. If I need to block to do deep work, I can just put a big block on the calendar and go to the task list to figure out what I need to do (and the task list probably has some sort of prioritization, anyway).
We need better productivity apps, but the calendar seems like a solved problem (unless I'm desperately out of touch and everyone hates Outlook/GCal).
Experimenting with using a calendar for work can – in my experience working with hundreds of people – have a dramatically positive impact on they people work. Give it a go :)
Here's some free "customer problems" that I would love a calendar product to address.
* Meetings without stated purposes and expected outcomes - even if it just said "we're spitballing around Topic X and we just want ideas on the next hill to take", that would be so helpful to enforce upon creation and then sharing as part of the "upcoming meeting" notifications, upon forwarding to others, etc. Everything starts with "why."
* Helping me "prepare" for those meetings by finding useful context (Outlook/Teams has started doing this, by the way, it's kinda eh now but I expect it to be fairly awesome and "just work" in the next couple of years because the problem and solution are fairly clear, but the integrations with data sources will take time - see Project Cortex as a path forward for this within orgs, but for external meetings ...?)
* Letting me have "flexible" meetings where if something comes in that's a conflict, giving me options to auto-address the conflict (move meeting, cancel) or provide options and let me manually confirm.
* Again, Microsoft is working on this, but I think some kind of - even extremely basic - graph / mindmap view of a meeting and its context - kind of like a visual syllabus or bulletin board so you can see how this meeting fits into a larger project / initiative
But also, the biggest one by far would be instituting ways to generate "time affluence" - I need "SEIZE THE DAY"-style interventions!
https://behavioralscientist.org/time-confetti-and-the-broken...
For me, even just one meeting on a given day exhausts me, and while the wfh is nice, it's led to many more 'meetings', whether just calls or proper zoom meetups. I'm not a fan.
If you're like me and are the classic gifted child (brilliant but lazy) it is the ideal role, just know your stuff, show up, win the work, and let everyone else handle the day to day particulars.
Really great to have a bird's eye view of your year
Strikes me as overpromising what their tool can deliver. Presidents and executives have people who they pay to protect their time and also offload a lot of the basic tasks of daily life - cooking, cleaning, laundry, childcare, etc. to others.
I'm interested in how we can create more time for deep work, but I'm also skeptical.
Ostensibly, the travel site was more efficient, but only in the sense that they dropped a 5-person travel office that had previously handled things. But the site was so hard to use correctly that they hired another 5-person travel office and a 10-person finance team to help manage travel and the use of corporate cards for the office.
I also had the same issues with todo lists and calendars. They don't communicate with each other. A calendar treats events as the main abstraction when in reality I want it to treat tasks as the main abstraction. When tasks are main, a lot of problems with todo lists are solved, especially the lack of intra-day time bounding for them. I want to know exactly what to do at all points of the day, so that I can get more done. Of course, most people aren't as serious as me, but having such an abstraction is still good for them as well.
In a way, this is great user validation if people are having similar problems and are building their own solutions. I wish Rise all the best.
That being said, rather than having text, a mockup with images or better yet, a video, would work better. On my site, the entire video is only an animation mockup, and it's gotten me over 1.3k email signups already (yes I know email signups != revenue, but it's interest at least).
Plus there is no info/ToS regarding submitting the email, for what I know you could just collect emails and sell them.
We do a special kind of syncing that protects your privacy and if you use Fantastical (which supports Reclaim), it'll intelligently merge the opaque blocks together to make it appear as one.
Give it a shot and let us know what you think :)
Entire boutique solutions arise around features and ideas that were implemented over a decade ago by Microsoft.
So many Golang developers I know have never been exposed to Active Directory, Exchange, etc. It's scary.
For example, accept all meetings tentatively if they're scheduled between 9-4, and they don't overlap with another meeting.
You can't even auto-accept meetings in Google Calendar OOTB.
We do:
- Privacy-centric calendar sync (eg: "Job Interview" source -> "Personal Commitment" on work cal)
- Flexible time blocking that throttles free/busy time, allowing you to be available for meetings if you have time
- Support for recurring habits (eg: lunch, catch up on email, etc)
- Support for one-off tasks, chunked up into blocks (currently integrates w/ Google Tasks, more coming)
- Automatic event classification and color coding
- Automatic Slack status sync based on your agenda
Sadly, the product I developed didn't take off but if you are interested in a left field take on a calendar design, you might want to take a look: https://www.chronoflocalendar.com
I googled "GRIP book", and found nothing.
Emiel worked on Blendle, Tidal and a ton of other really pretty products.
And obviously we'll show more of the product as soon as we have it :)
