Welcome to a new era of intelligent calendaring

One of my political icons used to love to say, “we all do better, when we all do better.” 

Paul Wellstone was speaking of communities, but the same is true of teams of all shapes and sizes. At our best, we amplify one another, creating a force that is greater than the sum of its parts.

In a weird way, time is like that. 

Clockwise was founded on a relatively simple insight: the key to a better work schedule for you, is ±more efficient coordination of all the schedules and commitments you connect with. A software platform that has better information about everyone’s time-based preferences and constraints can optimize across a group to make better schedules — more productive and more satisfying schedules — for everyone.

And when everyone has a better schedule, we all do better. We perform better, we go home happier, we ship more impact…we have more of those blissful, fleeting moments where we close the laptop at the end of the day feeling that we did a good day’s work.

But let’s face it: scheduling sucks. 

Unless you’re important enough or lucky enough to have an executive assistant, the way we go about finding time to meet with each other is a massively time-consuming, manual, costly process.

I’ve spent the last eight years thinking a lot about time – how we spend it, categorize, optimize it. Yet even in this journey, I sometimes have found myself lacking a complete understanding of how bad it is out there because Clockwise is a small startup with pretty clean schedules.

But the average schedule for, say, a member of the marketing team at a giant technology company like Salesforce or Google? I see it and weep. Double bookings. Triple bookings. Fragmented schedules that leave no time for getting actual work done. And never a spare moment for a break between meetings on a packed day.

The economic impact of lost hours is simply astronomical.

Not to mention, the time and energy it takes to actually schedule all these meetings (what many experts call the coordination tax) decreases employee productivity and costs companies millions of dollars annually. To put it neatly, employees’ wasted time is one of the biggest wastes of company resources. 

Seems like a no-brainer to fix these scheduling problems, right? The reality is they are so persistent, so tricky to navigate that most people have just thrown their hands up in the air and accepted these issues as impossible to solve, a part of corporate life. 

The massive waste of the most expensive resource in our economy is seen as an intractable problem. 

And as the workplace becomes more remote, more hybrid, and more dispersed, it’s only getting worse.

At Clockwise, we started on a path to solve this eight years ago with a calendar solution that automatically and dynamically reacts to scheduling conflicts as things change throughout your work week. So instead of manually calculating all the myriad downstream impacts of a single meeting for an individual, team, or entire company, your calendar essentially optimizes itself around the clock.

If there’s one thing we believe at Clockwise, it’s that everyone deserves a schedule they love. We’re announcing something soon that I believe is set to make an even bigger dent in solving the scheduling problem – the biggest remaining unsolved problem in the workplace. 

No one should wear a busy calendar as a badge of honor. 

And while our attempts at mind reading and conjuring time out of nowhere are valiant efforts in balancing each other’s needs with maintaining forward progress, I think we could all use something a bit more magical. 

If time really is a company’s greatest resource, let’s make sure we spend it on the things that matter most. THAT’s what it means to manage your calendar intelligently.  

We’re here because we believe we can make that a reality for all knowledge workers. We see how it can come together. We can make that small dent in the universe. Even if you’re not a time nerd like I am, I hope you’ll join on this journey to reimagine what our work days can be. I’ll be sleeping restlessly tonight, too excited about what’s to come.