I’ve been interested in how calendar apps will evolve. I’ve written some hypotheses on this topic before.

Calendars exist in so many products - as small widgets in events websites to restaurant apps. Often there’s a booking process that starts and ends within the app - sometimes they offer the ability to add the event to your calendar, but that’s about it.

I wonder if we could turn this around - if start a search and booking process from the calendar itself, without having to switch contexts. Essentially take a customer centric approach to the calendar vs one optimized for service providers. It would be super convenient for me to add a time slot in my calendar for a dinner reservation at a restaurant, and then check Opentable right there.

I can imagine taking this to the next step and enabling to do lists with calendar availability too. Example: adding a task like “Get a haircut” to your list then shows the availability of your preferred hairdresser or barber, and you can do the booking process right there (yes I need a haircut and this is on my list).

This feels like a problem Google and Apple should eventually get to, because there’s so much room for improvement in how we interact with calendars to manage time.