Your digital agenda - The cornerstone of your daily activities or not just yet?

Digital calendars (like Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar or Apple Calendar) are probably one of the most used productivity tools in the world. Almost every employee has a digital agenda, which gives an overview of all upcoming scheduled events. While these tools are so crucial for the day-to-day productivity of millions of employees, it is strange that the evolution in these tools is still rather limited.

Ultimately the digital calendar should become your central cockpit organizing all your tasks and events, which need to be done on a certain date or by a certain date. Today, this is far from a reality.

Instead we have a variety of tools managing and tracking our day-to-day tasks, i.e.

• Task management tools, like BPMS systems
• Project tracking tools, like JIRA, Asana…​
• Location tracking tools, like Google Maps
• Time tracking tools, like Clarity, My Hours, Jibble, Harvest, Clockify, TimeChimp…​
• Availability tracking tools (tracking holidays, sickness…​), like tools exposed by social secretariats or e.g. Officient
• Specialized tools, like CRM tools (managing tasks related to sales and marketing campaigns, e.g. SalesForce) or domain-specific tools managing specific business tasks
• …​

Often employees use multiple of these tools together, making synchronization a very time-consuming and error prone (leading to lots of inconsistencies) process.
Of course a standard digital calendar cannot provide the specialized flows and screens of the above tools and can therefore not replace all of these tools, but the digital calendar should be a central cockpit collecting all data gathered by these other tools (about your current and planned activities) and distribute them automatically to the other tools for consistency. Several add-ons and plugins for the calendars exist already today providing some integrations, but those are typically hard to setup and only point-to-point (i.e. a one-to-one synchronization), but the calendar will typically not orchestrate the resulting resynchronization to other tools. Ideally Microsoft, Google and Apple should agree on standard APIs to retrieve and update all calendar data in a simple way, but also provide a subscription mechanism so that tools can subscribe to any action (manual or automatic) happening in your calendar.

We can identify multiple domains where the calendar can play a central role in the coordination and facilitation:

• Mobility:
  • When an event is scheduled, a physical location should always be determined (i.e. the meeting owner can indicate a specific location and/or add the option for digital presence, in which case your location as a participant should be derived automatically by the calendar). If multiple locations (physical and/or digital) are proposed by the meeting organizer, the agenda should request where the user will be (so that this info can be shared with the meeting organizer but can also be used for mobility reasons).
  • Based on the identified location of the meeting, the digital agenda can automatically:
    • Block a slot for the estimated travel time
    • Based on user preferences and location, determine the ideal trajectory and transportation means (and add them to the event details)
    • Based on user preferences and chosen transportation means, the blocked slot can know which type of (professional) activity is still possible. E.g. still possible to have an internal call with a colleague when driving to a meeting.
    • A location tracking tool could feed the mobility information back to your agenda, so that all mobility information is centralized, allowing easy dashboarding/reporting, but also verification (e.g. to justify a mobility expense)
  • Furthermore, when talking about mobility, this should be considered in its largest sense, e.g. for companies with large buildings it is also important to manage the time required to go from one meeting room to another. In many large firms, you see that meetings tend to start always with 5-10 minutes delay, because some participants had a meeting just before and still had to move from one room to another. This gives a huge productivity loss, as some people come in time. It would be better that the calendar would automatically anticipate this mobility and plan the meeting 5-10 minutes later. An AI system could learn based on experience the time required to move from one meeting room to another.
• Time tracking:
  • If information of which tool you are using and on which tasks you are working (e.g. fed by JIRA or other tools) can be collected, time tracking tools can be filled in automatically with much more detailed information.
  • The time tracking is important for customer invoicing, tracking the spending on projects, comparing for projects the estimated time with the actual time…​
• Holiday planning:
  • All kind of requests need to be done for insurance reasons, but also for salary/HR reasons (typically fed to social secretariats).
  • Usually specific tools are used for this, after which info is manually duplicated in your agenda. This duplication should be fully automated.
• Task management:
  • Tasks can be planned or unplanned. However also an unplanned task will likely have some kind of deadline or priority, which means it will be executed somewhere in a time period. Furthermore, once executed, each task can be scheduled (in the past).
  • The task management tool and your digital agenda should therefore be much more integrated, allowing to better plan, organize and prioritize your tasks and give you in the morning a dashboard of your day, with not only your scheduled appointments, but also your planned (or soon due) tasks.
  • Ideally a good integration with the mail system can allow the agenda to automatically identify deadlines put in mails (via NLP), after which you could receive a pop-up with the question to add automatically to your agenda for easy follow-up.
• Resource management: organizing an event (e.g. a meeting) typically involves more than just bringing together several people. The agenda should therefore automatically take care of ordering (and modifying/cancelling if needed) resources, like meeting rooms, catering, video/phone calls, required equipment like flipcharts, beamers…​
• Personal life calendar: your agenda should not only manage your professional activities, but also your personal activities and have a good link with calendars of your partner, children or other family, which have a strong impact on your calendar.
  • Instead of manually inputting events, all organizations and professionals (such as schools, hairdresser, doctor, dentist, sports clubs…​) should send an invitation to your agenda. This would make it much easier to communicate practical arrangements about an appointment (e.g. place, things to bring along…​), cancel or move appointments. E.g. if a training session in your sports club is cancelled, instead of being informed by different channels, a simple event cancellation would suffice to update everyone.
  • The calendar should automatically fill in events like anniversaries of friends and family, special occasions (like Mother’s Day or Wedding Anniversaries)…​
• Financial calendar: your digital agenda should also act as your financial calendar, i.e. giving an overview (per date) of incoming and outgoing payments (both historically executed transactions and planned or expected, upcoming transactions)
• Health calendar: your agenda should also be a central aggregator of your health information, as it is typically also time-based. Information like medication to be taken or medical check-ups should be automatically scheduled in your agenda. Furthermore all info collected by your Fitbit or sports watch, should be stored in your agenda (i.e. health ware registers the sporting activity, but then creates an activity in your agenda, with exact start date/end date, location, health details…​), but also info about your screen time can be automatically stored in your agenda.
• Relationship with suppliers (like cleaning personnel, nanny, gardener…​), which you don’t pay immediately, but you pre-pay or post-pay for/after a number of services. At that moment keeping track of the invoiced versus executed activities is always a hassle. If you can easily find back this info in your calendar by doing a simple search, this becomes much easier.

In the end, the idea is that all time-based (both future and past) data related to you as an individual are stored in your agenda.
When all this data is tracked (just like a PFM app for your banking transactions), this can give valuable insights and improvements:

• A good classification of your time consumption can give you very valuable insights, where you can make optimizations.
• A detailed overview of all your activities both past and future can result in an optimal configuration of certain devices and subscriptions (e.g. your thermostat in your house.
• It automatically becomes your life-story archive, which can be interesting for certain audits and justifications, for looking up medical history…​

This setup is however only possible, when your agenda becomes your unique life-planner, meaning the distinction between your professional and private calendar should disappear (already today the distinction between work hours and personal hours are becoming harder to make). When all data is integrated in 1 calendar, it should be linked not to an (professional or personal) email address, but to you as a person (hence the need for a global unique digital identity). This means also that you as a person are in full control of the agenda and not your employer. Just like "Bring your own device" is becoming more and more common, a concept of "Bring your own agenda" should become a standard.

Note: Apart from a personal calendar, there should also be something like a corporate calendar, i.e. a calendar linked to a company, which contains all (scheduled) events linked to a legal entity, such as annual/quarterly reporting, investor meetings, company employee events (e.g. Xmas party, New Year’s party…​), exhibitions, customer events, board meetings…​ Just like a personal calendar, this calendar should also have rules which info can be shared publically and which info is private (e.g. only to management, only to investors, only to board members, only to employees…​).

As this agenda would become a central cockpit of all your life activities and exchange info (mainly about availability) with many different stakeholders, security and privacy are of course of highest importance. Ultimately the agenda owner should always be in full control of his data.

The biggest complexity for this is to tag every event, with different classifications, e.g. private vs. professional, specific project, hobby, sport…​ This tagging should be done as much as possible automatically, via AI-models using info about the event, the origin of the event, the involved participants, the location of the event, the timing of the event…​

This classification and tagging allows not only to easily filter on events (searching events, reporting on events, statistics…​), but also to manage access restrictions, i.e. each person/party accessing your agenda will have for every type of event the right to

• See all details, just the title, just the planned activity or nothing at all
• Modify/Cancel the activity

This process of sharing your calendar (and managing the restrictions) should become much more intuitive, guided and automated (via AI techniques) compared to today. This will be important as much more stakeholders will be exchanging info with your agenda, meaning time spent on sharing your agenda should be minimized, while spam (just like spam filters for your email) and criminal activity (e.g. criminals checking your scheduled activities to know when you are not at home) should be avoided as much as possible.

It will be interesting to see if in the future, this type of evolution in your agenda will unfold.