We're Building a Calendar for Work | Hacker News Reader

We're Building a Calendar for Work

risecalendar.com

52 pointsrickpastoor64 comments

Every time someone wants to sell me a calendar, another todo list or an optimizer for my time, I will try to tell them, that software is not going to help me.

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...

As a developer of a calendar app, that I never myself use...

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.

> Every time someone wants to sell me a calendar, another todo list or an optimizer for my time, I will try to tell them, that software is not going to help me.

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.

I love what you're doing with reclaim!

> 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.

Couldn't agree more. People > Process, both ways around.

It's a lot like a new diet. Ya it might help a few people concretely but for the most part its going to be a lot of people posting about how this great new diet is going to change their life but its ultimately ineffective and used as a signaling tool briefly before becoming a scapegoat.

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.

Thanks for sharing. For tons of people using your calendar to actually schedule work is a new concept (probably not for you and most people here). In my experience it can be very powerful to map out your work and see that you're fully booked and need to start making different decisions.

Looking forward to bring something delightful and with a fresh perspective to guide that process.

Be careful what you wish for; before you know it, someone is instead selling you an entire framework for work and that is infinitely worse than any single office productivity app.

To be fair, OP is an author of a best-selling book on this subject. I feel this new app is an extension of that like Things was based on GTD.

Am I missing something or does this product page have no information about / images of the actual product? I guess the point is to generate buzz but this kind of marketing dishonesty is unwelcome.

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.

The reason for sharing our thinking early is actually a way to gather feedback at the point in time where we're able to include it in the product. But I totally see your perspective and probably won't be able to convince you of our intentions, which is fine :)

If you haven’t built an MVP and used it, how can you be sure it’s revolutionary or even viable?

We're not sure, we'll find out if it meets our high expectations :)

Very disappointed. It's just a mechanism to collect emails.

If they had a bunch of screenshots of something that didn't exist yet, would that make you feel better? I thought one of the big lessons from startups was to talk to potential users/customers to discover and validate problems before jumping in to code. They seem to be trying a variation - putting out a scenario, and seeing who reacts to it. If people sign up, and they get some engagements from people with more problem validation, then build based on that... what's wrong?

It's a little bit more intricate than that. The point is to figure out what the customer needs. The Mom Test (book) covers this pretty well.

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.

That shoelace example is interesting because people do actually buy non-shoelace shoes, such as slipons, or the new Nike that have that folding hinge in the middle. But generally yes, I agree that one should focus on what is a real problem that people would pay lots of money for.

A bunch of mock-ups of something that doesn’t exist doesn’t seem any worse than a description of the same.

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.

Would like to point out that the first three commenters as well as the creators of the project all have links to the Netherlands. Two of the three accounts have been dormant for a long time, too, before commenting infomercial-sounding comments here.

The founders are well known and respected in The Netherlands. Not sure what you imply.

op was implying that maybe the three accounts from Netherlands might all belong to a group of people with similar motives and probably wanted others to be wary of this considering the accounts have been dormant for a while too

Do that many people hate the Outlook calendar? I like it (maybe a bit less in OWA, but honestly it's pretty much the same). Appointments show up, meeting rooms are pre-populated, I can see when other people are busy when writing an invite and move the meeting (or reconsider if it needs to happen at all). Oh, and when people email me invites they show up in my calendar, which doesn't work nearly as well when your calendar can't see your mailbox. Google Calendar is also fine (if a bit less comfortable).

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).

I usually really like Outlook, but it does seem to behave poorly when used with certain servers. For example G Suite / Google Work calendar is very... weird with Outlook. It's not seamless, and I tend to get reminders for things that happened weeks or months ago on a recurring schedule that I cannot find and remove.

> 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

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 :)

As someone who has something on the order of 20-30 meetings a week, time management and preparedness are a critical path for success.

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...

I'm curious what leads to having that many meetings a week.

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.

It's my role, I'm part of the "front door" for the data and AI practice at a large tech consultancy, so supporting lots of conversations for both sales and delivery - like a hotel concierge of sorts, if he were a principal architect :)

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.

1-year 1-page calendar: https://davidseah.com/node/compact-calendar/ The Compact Calendar by David Seah

Really great to have a bird's eye view of your year

"You know how Presidents and executives manage to be fully present for the extent of a 30 minute meeting? They never spend time thinking about when to leave, what time it is or how long they have until the meeting ends."

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.

Offices used to offer some of that protection (not extending to the home/personal life) to their employees by having a secretary/admin attached to individual teams. At my last office, they experienced a sharp decline in productivity as things like business travel, writing/tracking memos, scheduling meetings, etc. was shifted increasingly to the technical staff and individual workers.

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.

This is very interesting, I'm building something similar, an open source todo list + calendar at https://getartemis.app.

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).

Nice landing page, but I am missing the "Pricing" section, I would never sign-up to a product that doesn't disclose pricing beforehand.

Thanks for the feedback, it's free during beta, but I haven't released that yet so it's just signing up for the email list for now.

Nice, but I would still mention that.

Plus there is no info/ToS regarding submitting the email, for what I know you could just collect emails and sell them.

You're right, I'll have to add that in, I just haven't gotten around to making a ToS yet.

Oh my gosh, this is so much more intriguing than OP's landing page.

Thanks! What drew you to it, or made it intriguing, if you don't mind me asking?

Thanks, looks cool!

I tried both FireFox and Chrome and I'm not actually seeing the calendar. Is there no screenshots or demo or anything?

There's a wall of text that you can barely see. I believe it's light purple on a dark purple background? Perhaps it hints at all the events on your calendar blending so well together that you cannot tell them apart!

:')

All I want from my perfect calendar is that it syncs perfectly with all other calendars that are foisted on me, that all run on different tech stacks (mainly multiple O365 and Google accounts these days) and that presents me with a holistic overal schedule of my time while keeping my different realms (work, family, friends,...) completely silod from each other.

My startup, reclaim.ai, does a lot of that -- except for the O365 part (for now).

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 :)

Sadly lack of O365 support is a deal-breaker for me (and I suspect many others) as that is where my company work calendar resides.

I was confused by this at first because I was thinking we already had a calendar app that promised all this with the same name that Microsoft acquired. Then I remembered that was Sunrise not Rise. Hopefully this one isn’t as good so that it doesn’t get bought and shutdown.

You might be looking for Sunsama, which seems to be a clone of Sunrise.

The amount of left coast tech types who've never used Outlook is astounding.

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.

Somewhat agreed. That's of course not to say that "it was solved in 2005, it never needs to be revisited again" but approaching many issues as "tech" issues, and also not having some background/history of what came before (and the why behind it) leads to a lot of wasted time/effort.

What's a feature of Outlook that's underappreciated most?

Anything beyond basic calendaring, and the awesome powerful rules engine it has.

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.

If folks are interested in this topic (calendars + better time management) and want to try something that is in production today and available for signup (GCal only), check out my startup: https://reclaim.ai.

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

A few years ago, I thought I'd try to redesign the calendar (as these guys seem to want to do). My innovation was integrating a timeline navigation to allow you to easily animate between months and years. Plus, loads of visual customisation options.

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

Nice!

Did they forget to a include the actual calendar?

Another plug for a calendar tool focused on consumers: Domestica. Instead of just being a calendar tool, Domestica focuses on integrating all the things in Domestica (events, meal plans, to dos, recurring transactions, etc) into a meta calendar view.

https://about.domestica.app

I loved the headline and was intrigued. However, the page told me nothing about what the product does. I was excited to see a demo, or screenshots or something. Also, this wording near the top is all fluff: "bestseller GRIP with world class and internationally praised design."

I googled "GRIP book", and found nothing.

Here's more on my book (out in NL and sold >60k copies self published, will be out internationally later this year): gripboek.nl/english

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 :)

I feel like there's always some person or company that's trying to revolutionize the calendar. At this point, how different will it be from what Outlook or Google Calendar offer? Even if there's something game changing, how many people will actually maintain these two different systems?

As long as it offers CalDAV...

"Where's the Beef?"

Interesting integration to use your calendar as the central location to plan your day

Looking forward to a Calendar that I'd actually like to use :)

I'm really looking forward to this app. Looks like a nice combination of a calendar with a todo-list.

It’s nice to disclose that you’re friends with the creators when you post comments like this.

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