Analytics for your Outlook calendar (what MS should have built)

2 points

15 years ago

My day job is leading a UX team for a large software company, and as someone who manages writers, designers, and developers, I know how disruptive meetings can be to people who create. As such, I take measures that perhaps other managers do not, to ensure that my team doesn't cringe at the sight of a new meeting invitation from their boss.

One thing I and my team have struggled with is quantifying our 'annual investment' in meetings. Questions like the ones that follow are very difficult to answer using Outlook's interface:

- How much time in the past year have we spent in meetings? - Which people in the organization tend to hog the greatest amount of our time? - How many 1-hour meetings do we have throughout the year (versus 1/2-hour)? - What are the most 'expensive' meetings we attend? - With whom do we tend to be in meeting on a regular basis? - Who is always scheduling ^#!@!*&^$ early morning meetings?!?!

So in the spirit of PG's essay, "Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule", three of us (all working for the same company for our day job) set out to build a visually-pleasing, engaging analytics tool for Outlook calendar that would give designers and developers answers to questions about how we spend our time. It's called Meetalytics.

We’d love to be to the Outlook calendar what Xobni is to the Outlook inbox.

Turns out that quantifying the way you spend your time -- and then sharing that with your team and manager -- is actually pretty powerful. It gives you the ability to say "We need to cut down on the number of hour-long meetings" or "I get pulled into meetings way too much during my ideal 'creative zone' time" or "Can you please speak to so-and-so about how they use my time?. Comparing Meetalytics between similar roles is also very enlightening.

So besides some background on our start-up, what's the point of this post? Our goal is three-fold:

1. Solicit feedback on the concept from start-up founders, entrepreneurs, and anyone who regularly uses Outlook calendar in their work life. [http://www.meetalytics.com]

2. Give this awesome community an opportunity to get a complimentary Outlook calendar analysis the moment we're live for beta. Simply visit our beta sign-up page (and be sure to use "hackernews" -- without the quotes -- in the invitation code field). [http://www.meetalytics.com/signup]

3. Connect with someone in the HN community who can introduce us to someone senior at a large organization (tech would be great; other sectors are cool too!) who may have a need for our solution. My email is in my HN profile.

Many thanks, Lance, Joanna, and John