The tyranny of the digital calendar

Managing yourselfAdd to myFTGet instant alerts for this topicManage your delivery channels hereRemove from myFTThe tyranny of the digital calendarAs workers struggle with overcomplicated shared schedules, tech companies say they can help© FT montage/DreamstimeThe tyranny of the digital calendar on x (opens in a new window)The tyranny of the digital calendar on facebook (opens in a new window)The tyranny of the digital calendar on linkedin (opens in a new window)The tyranny of the digital calendar on whatsapp (opens in a new window) Save The tyranny of the digital calendar on x (opens in a new window)The tyranny of the digital calendar on facebook (opens in a new window)The tyranny of the digital calendar on linkedin (opens in a new window)The tyranny of the digital calendar on whatsapp (opens in a new window) Save Emma JacobsPublishedDecember 16 2025Jump to comments sectionPrint this pageUnlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.At this time of year, juggling social drinks, work parties and pre-Christmas deadlines, while also scheduling when to pick up the turkey and host relatives, the electronic calendar can feel tyrannical rather than helpful.I hate mine so much, I am considering returning to a paper diary next year. This is not a humble brag about being busy, but a whinge about overcomplicated scheduling. Most of us recognise the email back-and-forth, flipping between apps to hold multiple times in diaries, or discovering a meeting convener in a different timezone has reserved 30 minutes to chat when you should be tucked up in bed.

One San Francisco-based executive I know repeatedly sent me a bunch of dates via Calendly, all for 10pm. I blocked him. At least I have not fallen victim (yet) to scammers adding phishing links to my diary.The digital calendar has become a staple of office life, with companies such as Google as well as newer, smaller tools like Motion and Reclaim offering to streamline and optimise scheduling. These ubiquitous shared calendars have brought some interesting dynamics to the surface. When teams have access to each other’s schedules, it can help protect time or it can become intrusive, as one man revealed on social media. He discovered his calendar was not private after his boss asked if they could “do the product intro” on Friday — at a time the busy employee had blocked out to “get a chicken”. Patrick Lightbody is attempting to rectify some of these problems with Reclaim.ai, the artificial intelligence app he co-founded that promises to schedule work, meetings and life. He says shared electronic calendars have historically suffered from a lack of nuance, unable to denote whether an appointment is open to negotiation.Social dynamics — and tensions — inevitably come into play. Vanessa Ciccone, a social scientist at the London School of Economics and Political Science, studied an organisation that set employees’ default calendars to “open”, giving them the option to make them private. “People were largely willing to accept that senior-level workers had things to do that warranted calendar privacy, whereas non-senior-level workers were not afforded this same level of understanding.” Junior workers opting to keep their calendars hidden were described as “secretive”, with suspicions that they were hiding something. Open calendars can help with logistics if, for example, only two people are booked to use a giant boardroom that could be repurposed for a larger meeting, notes Ciccone. The flipside is surveillance, with managers monitoring their teams’ time. There can be other outcomes from such transparency. One man used colleagues’ schedules like Instagram, scrolling “through people’s calendars as a person might scroll through a social media website”, says Ciccone. “He also felt exclusion at times due to this scrolling, where he would occasionally find a meeting or an after-work drinks event that he wasn’t invited to.”Then there’s the etiquette. Julian Givi, associate professor of marketing at West Virginia University, found that a “maybe” response to diary invitations was seen as kinder, by those RSVPing, than a hard “no”; it was, in reality, far more annoying, making it harder to plan a party or arrange a meeting. “While a ‘maybe’ leaves you with flexibility, it’s not really good for those who invited you,” says Givi. “They might be left feeling disrespected that you left them in limbo.”While my instinct is to return to paper-based diaries, efforts by tech enthusiasts to solve such problems look promising. Already, Google’s Gemini is proving useful to me by entering suggested meeting times in my electronic calendar based on discussions in email exchanges.“Right now, your calendar is a passive tool that lets others claim your time,” says Louise Ballard, co-founder of Atheni, an AI-powered coach that helps users navigate agentic tools. “Soon, AI agents will actively defend it, learning when you do your best thinking, blocking out focus time, even negotiating meeting slots on your behalf. I’m certainly going to train my agent to protect the hours I need to get stuff done.” She says the time drag of negotiating scheduling with others could be fixed by an agent, for example by setting a future date to meet in response to a discussion over Zoom. “Tools like Motion are already doing this — automatically rescheduling your day when plans change and protecting deep work time. We tried it last year, and it wasn’t brilliant, but things are moving at breakneck speed.”Lightbody says AI’s ability to work beyond the simple binary between busy or free will be transformative. “You’ll actually have more of a conversational state with someone’s personal assistant, a digital personal assistant.”The future, says Ballard, will be “two agents haggling over diary slots while you get on with actual work. Liberating or terrifying, depending on your outlook.”Reuse this content (opens in new window) CommentsJump to comments sectionPromoted Content Follow the topics in this article Technology sector Add to myFT Managing yourself Add to myFT Office life Add to myFT Emma Jacobs Add to myFT Comments