I was at a book club yesterday and the topic of AI calendar assistants came up. My gut feeling towards them was cold, but I couldn’t really articulate why. Here are some loose thoughts to help me formulate something resembling an opinion.
I’ll start by saying that calendar assistants are tools, and like any tool, you can use it well or use it poorly. I’m not here to say they’re a bad idea.
- What do we lose when we stop thinking about how we’re spending our time? It feels like an erosion of the human experience. I enjoy the process of sitting down in the morning and deciding what’s important to me that day.
- When it’s easy to fit something in, it’s harder to question whether we should do it at all. Is there a risk that automatic scheduling simply wastes our time more efficiently?
- Does the assistant include happiness in its fitting function? The algorithmically perfect way of spending time may not be the way that brings you the most satisfaction. How important this is may be a function of your job. It’s one thing if you’re self-employed and can afford to leave efficiency on the table, but otherwise your boss might not care that you’d prefer not to have meetings on a Friday and go for walks when the sun is shining.
- A subset of productivity influencers will encourage you to be more efficient with your work simply to do more work. This is also dependent on your working life. If you’re paid for forty hours, it’s right to use them as fully as possible. If you can get forty hours of work done in thirty, though, and spend your newly unlocked ten hours looking at pictures of dogs, then that’s a life well lived.
Ultimately, my concerns are a little hand-wavy. I just see something that makes it easier to auto-pilot through life and the alarm bell dings. I would prefer to be the sculptor of my time, even if it’s a little more work.
