Don’t Save My Time, Save My Humanity

Michael Tan
Sep 5, 2018 · 4 min read

A: “Hey ____, haven’t seen you in forever! We need to catch up!”

B: “For sure! What time works for you?”

A: “How about lunch on Tuesday at noon?”

B: “Can’t I have class then — how about Wednesday dinner at 7pm?”

A: “I’ll be busy… how about…?”

And so on.

You know how it goes. You’re trying to schedule a time to catch up with a friend, and oftentimes it ends up in this back and forth as you try to find times that work for both of you. It’s tedious and frustrating. Sometimes it gets so bad that the proposed hangout ends up falling through altogether.

Having just come back to college from a long summer, I was thrilled to see friends I hadn’t seen for months, but much less thrilled when we tried to decide on a time to have that mandatory catchup session that friends should have. My friends were equally as frustrated.

One of them introduced me to a great solution. Instead of going through this annoying back and forth, my friend Rahul showed me an app called Calendly that would make the process quick and painless, saving time and energy for everyone involved. In Calendly, Rahul was able to mark times when he was free, and anyone would then be able to schedule a meeting at any of those free times. All that happened was that Rahul sent me his Calendly link, and I chose between his open times and settled quickly on dinner at 6pm on August 27th. Very clean, very quick, and very painless.

I loved it. No frustrations, no tedium. The next day, I made my own Calendly, as I wanted to share the wealth. No longer would anyone close to me have to suffer through exasperating scheduling. I took some time to set up my Calendly, calibrating all the settings to optimize for usability and fluidity.

But when I sent my Calendly to my friends instead of going through the normal aforementioned scheduling process with them, the reaction was not what I expected. Instead of the relief and gratitude at the saved time and energy resulting from Calendly, there were feelings of “elitism” and “a lack of humanity.” Harsh, I know, especially coming from your friends.

When Calendly dehumanizes you into just another “connection”

What was the problem here?

It starts with what people value most in human relationships. Above all, people want to know that they are respected as people, and/or that they matter.

The way we treat our time is a paradox. Although we all are given an endowment of time each and every day, namely 24 hours, we do not want to treat this endowment as an expendable commodity, even though it is, by any factual definition. Because of this, we can often feel dehumanized as people when our time is commoditized into a small 60-minute dinner slot on an electronic app, even if we are in fact having our time and energy saved and operating more efficiently.

The ritual of asking for times over and over again until two parties find a suitable one is an endearing, although tedious, part of life. To commit yourself to that drudgery with another person implicitly says that you value them enough to go through the aforementioned drudgery. But to send a Calendly link is to implicitly state that they’re not important enough for you to spend time on.

It’s an important realization. We want to matter enough for others to spend time on us, even if that comes at the cost of our own time. From a strictly utilitarian viewpoint, we can say that we value a sense of “mattering” more than we value the less abstract commodity of time. And this whole Calendly episode is just another case study serving as proof of that principle.

So that’s what my friends mean by “a lack of humanity.” What about the comment of “elitism?” I had a friend tell me after filling out my Calendly that she “felt very inferior lmao.” Connecting back to the point about mattering, when you implicitly tell someone that they don’t matter enough to suffer through tedious scheduling with, you’re also implying that they are not worth your time — it’s rather their job to look through your Calendly and find a time. Even though you may have indeed spent your time looking through your own calendar to set up a Calendly, the discrete nature of the two events — our effort and their effort — means that the whole episode is processed by the other with a large amount of recency bias, causing them to overweight the effort they spent looking through your Calendly and not realize the time you took to set up your Calendly. More than this, however, it’s slightly insulting to the other that you would make a calendar ubiquitous to all your friends and acquaintances, thus taking away the individual attention you would otherwise pay. It makes them feel less special.

And to feel special is something that everyone wants.

The Solution

I now approach with my friends in a way that both avoids these issues and still allows for us to save time, resulting in a win-win for everyone. It usually consists of something like this:

“Hey, would love to get lunch but I know we’d both hate the usual drudgery and tedium of going through times and calendars to find a rare match. Would be happy to do that but I also recently discovered a really cool app that automates that process for us, so let me know what you’d prefer.”

And for those of you interested, here it is: https://calendly.com/michaeltan07

When Calendly works wonders

Michael Tan
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