Hi,

Thanks for all the nice comments on our previous update. The more we're using and refining our scheduler, the more we see how vitally important it is to focus on this feature. There are simply too many factors that influence the quality of our timing, and simply by swapping out one way of scheduling for another we can have a huge impact on the flow of work in teams and orgs.

We do that in two ways, initially: offering a score and suggestions for improving that score for existing events, and by suggesting our TimeFinder to find the best time in a given time frame.

Here's what happened:

• We spent most of our time improving the explanation of said scores and improving the suggestions from our scheduler. Some details:

  • We now show, for each suggestion, the impact on focus time. Focus time: at least 120 mins without interruptions by meetings.

    

  • When dragging an event, we now render when at least one participant is not available right in the calendar. We also update the score in real time when you're finished dragging. Here's how that looks (if you look closely you'll see the availability of Emiel is flagged in the tooltip but not in the calendar, so there are still some rough edges):

    CleanShot 2021-09-24 at 13.50.20.mp4

  • If you use our timefinder, it is possible that you entered a combination of times where the end result is suboptimal. We don't want to block it though, but we want to challenge some of the factors. In that case we offer some suggestions at a glance. In this case you can see that we selected 'Monday' as our timeframe. If we would expand it to 'Next week', the rating turns green. Alternatively we could shorten the meeting, which would also have a positive effect.

    

  • It's now possible to quickly mark events as busy/available. This is useful when you want to use your calendar to schedule what you're up to but still want colleagues to be able to book that time if they need it.

    

  • Meanwhile we're also working with our initial users to fix a long list of bigger and smaller issues around saving and synchronizing, copying and pasting event where some properties were lacking. You can now drag all day events, and also turn non-all day events into all day events by dragging (and vice versa).

What's next?

• One of the things we learned from early feedback is that the testers really want Rise in an app on desktop. We've already laid the foundation for that, and we're planning on releasing a first version to our testers this cycle.
• One other big item on our list, most requested by our testers: the ability to quickly view a calendar of a colleague. For that we need to figure out and introduce a setting to define what you'll want to share.
• Besides that we're continuing to improve our scheduler. One big step we're planning is providing slots where some participants are not available. We'll obviously take that into account when ranking those options, but from there we can start help shuffling things around. With that we can get to something we really want to work on: second order rescheduling. If attendee A moves their meeting to X, we could fit this meeting in. Not for this cycle, but hopefully soon.

We're starting to see the shape of a feature that not only drastically simplifies team scheduling, but also improves the well being of the team by nudging towards times where the impact on time to focus is lower. We obviously noticed the announcements of Google of their analytics-release, and Microsoft has been doing that for a long time with Microsoft MyAnalytics (now Microsoft Viva Insights), but we don't think just insights will change behavior. The opposite: that data stresses you out. It makes you feel like you're doing something wrong. We're not going to do that. Instead, we will always pair the indicator with one click actions to improve the situation.