I Deleted My Calendar Link. And I’m Never Going Back
A Calendar Is Not a Marketplace
🍕 I’m JA Westenberg. I write essays about technology, philosophy, productivity, and what it means to be human. If you like ideas that take their time, you’re in the right place.
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Having a booking link I could fling in anyone’s direction used to feel like a superpower. Finally, I could avoid the hassle of actually managing and making decisions about my schedule.
The dream of a generation, surely.
Cal.com, Calendly, TidyCal, etc.- every time I set one up, I felt like I was making progress toward the grand goal of reducing drag and removing friction.
No more back and forth, no more trying to find a slot that “works for everyone,” no more worrying about time zones and daylight saving and so on.
But it also turned my attention, my focus, and the only resource I can never buy back into a self-service transaction that pushed me out of the loop while sucking me in.
It was convenience at the cost of my own judgment and my own agency.
When you give someone a link to your calendar and the technical permission to book however much time they like, whenever they like, that’s exactly what they’ll do. They’ll do it selfishly and with abandon, and it’s your own fault for not blocking out more time for yourself...
Most meetings are pointless to begin with.
Surely we can agree on that?
You get twenty minutes of faffing, small talk and horse trading before you get to 30 minutes of substance followed by 10 minutes of attempting to coordinate the end of the call; and you lose however much time before and after it in prepping and recapping, and you lose every opportunity you can’t fit in because you have another infernal Zoom call smack bang in the middle of your morning.
There is an inverse correlation between someone’s intelligence, their usefulness, and their need to have meetings. The less value you have and produce, the more calls you generate and the more time you actively hunt down and slaughter - your own, and everyone else’s - in an attempt to create evidence that You Were Here.
Frictionless scheduling was supposed to numb at least some of this pain. Faster bookings and fewer messages would mean less administrative effort, which would mean more efficiency. But what these multiplying calendar links have actually done is commodify everyone’s time and everyone’s schedule, turning scarce and precious seconds into a limitless add-to-cart shopping experience with no commitment, no cost, and no constraints.
Well, I’ve finally deleted my calendar link.
From now on, if you want to meet with me, it’s 10x harder for both of us. I think it’ll make for 10x better meetings, too. Particularly if it means 10x fewer meetings to begin with...
I have decided to welcome the back-and-forth, the friction, and the coordination problems, because I’ll actually have to think about my time and where I’m prepared to give it up, instead of letting everyone else triage it for me, according to their own convenience. If that resistance is too much for you - well, bad luck. Perhaps it was never meant to be in the first place.
If we can’t both absorb a short exchange to clarify the purpose of the call, question whether it matters enough to do it at all, rate its urgency, state a desired outcome and compare our diaries, we’ve no business jumping on a Zoom call.
We’ll accomplish very little at great expense.
A calendar should be a record of everything you give a s**t about, not a marketplace of openings and slots in a free-for-all of first-come, first-served scheduling. What you do with your day - and what I do with mine - is a responsibility worth embracing and managing, rather than a tedium to give away.
The clock is ticking. Let it tick for you, not against you.