4 ms·

I use a calendar and email as two different applications. But I see the two have been tightly linked for decades. What is the workflow that demands this integra

I use a calendar and email as two different applications. But I see the two have been tightly linked for decades. What is the workflow that demands this integration? Some clients will automatically create events from emails. But don't you get many more emails with dates in that you don't need to schedule for compared to the events you'll attend? Or there's the unified alerts when an important event is upcoming and when an important email arrives. But years ago we didn't have OS-level notification APIs like we do now. What am I overlooking that unified mail+calendar does that isn't available when they're separate?

gomox 6y ago
Companies with any significant amount of employees use email as the back end of calendar synchronization. Think managers with 40 meetings a week.
nickjj 6y ago
It's convenient. Example. I recently scheduled 35 podcast episodes with 35 different people. Each one required me to propose various dates and times to folks, and lock in specific times that didn't overlap. This meant opening my calendar and inbox side by side to see what's available while writing an email to someone to propose a few times. Then for locking in a specific time, gmail will intelligently auto-complete the calendar event notification email address of the person you have open so you can send them a calendar invite link quickly on their end. Without this tight integration there would have been a silly amount of copy / pasting.
- hellofunk 6y ago
  Sounds like you could really use something like https://calendly.com/ https://calendly.com/.
  - nickjj 6y ago
    That would require mucking around with another external tool. Google's calendar works quite well. It's one of those things where everything just works with the least amount of set up on my end.
    - hellofunk 6y ago
      In this case, this particular tool saves a tremendous amount of time in doing what you’re describing. I just started using it last year and was reluctant to, and it really does act like a little scheduling assistant.

gomox 6y ago

Companies with any significant amount of employees use email as the back end of calendar synchronization. Think managers with 40 meetings a week.

nickjj 6y ago

It's convenient. Example. I recently scheduled 35 podcast episodes with 35 different people. Each one required me to propose various dates and times to folks, and lock in specific times that didn't overlap. This meant opening my calendar and inbox side by side to see what's available while writing an email to someone to propose a few times. Then for locking in a specific time, gmail will intelligently auto-complete the calendar event notification email address of the person you have open so you can send them a calendar invite link quickly on their end. Without this tight integration there would have been a silly amount of copy / pasting.

hellofunk 6y ago
Sounds like you could really use something like https://calendly.com/ https://calendly.com/.
- nickjj 6y ago
  That would require mucking around with another external tool. Google's calendar works quite well. It's one of those things where everything just works with the least amount of set up on my end.
  - hellofunk 6y ago
    In this case, this particular tool saves a tremendous amount of time in doing what you’re describing. I just started using it last year and was reluctant to, and it really does act like a little scheduling assistant.