GSD ^ AI = Katella Defrag
“Sorry guys, I couldn’t finish my story with all the meetings yesterday”, a line often evoked on the daily stand-ups. And who can blame them; according to a study by Atlassian, a typical employee spends more than 8 hours per week in meetings. For leads and managers, that figure balloons to over 50% of their time. Worse yet, meetings are spread out throughout the day, introducing constant context switch and hampering focused productive time significantly.
Here’s my typical schedule and Bashir E’s, our comrade-in-arms.
I had about 4 hours of meeting yesterday, while Bashir had 5 hours. Not bad, except nothing else will get done in the afternoon with all the little meetings breaking up our flows.
Disciplined leaders find time to get things done: break-up big teams, utilize Pomodoro technique, turn off Slack 😶 or re-arrange meetings to open up free-time. But how do you scale to your managers, their teams, and down to the individual engineers? Not everyone has the discipline or desire to emulate their leaders (and it is one more thing you have to do — further eroding the time saving argument). Introducing Katella Defrag.
Remember the old windows machines defragmentation tool that recovered contiguous space on your drive? Well, Katella Defrag does exactly that with your time 🎤 .
How does Katella do this?
Today when you connect Katella with Google Calendar/Outlook and schedule a meeting, she will build a free-busy map between you and all your attendees, then proceed to derive the most mutually optimized slots available to suggest meeting times.
Katella Defrag takes this to the next level. She will rearrange your internal meetings and cluster them back-to-back, opening up contiguous chunks of time you can dedicate to GSD.
Katella uses reinforcement learning techniques to learn the optimal schedule preferences of the organization and defragment each individual’s schedule with respect to theirs and others’ preferences to maximize everyone’s GSD time. We consider several features including:
- ease of changing a meeting — just you or with 1 attendee (easy), 2–4 attendees (medium), 5+ attendees (pretty hard)
- how many meetings have to be moved — less than 2 (easy), 3 (manageable), 4+ (pretty hard)
- how soon are the changes (need some time for attendees to be notified)
and our output is the optimized meeting schedule for the day.
What does it look like?
Katella is built around natural language interfaces like Siri and Alexa so you can trigger defrag by simply stating your intentions to Katella in plain english, something along the lines of “I want to GSD today”, “clear out my calendar tomorrow”, or “optimize Friday schedule”.
Katella currently sends a Daily Glance which is a list of actionable insights derived from your various applications including your calendar. In it, Katella will pre-compute the optimized schedule, and if she is confident that you can gain some productive time, will show you the GSD button (we define GSD time as time not spent in meetings or blocked for oneself except lunchtime). Katella further computes your focused time which is any block of at least one hour. The goal is to maximize your and your teams’ focused time.
The proposed change will then be presented to you for confirmation
Once you give the go-ahead, Katella will automatically re-arrange the meetings for you and notify the attendees. Note that the proposed changes already fit nicely into each attendee’s schedule and won’t be happening in the next 60 minutes, so everyone will have plenty of time to notice the changes. Katella is smart and she will only book meetings within your normal working hours and not over lunch.
In this version of Katella Defrag, she will only move meetings around in the same day. As she gets more training data, she hopes to optimize your entire week’s schedule.
Fine prints: this feature only works within your corporate email(since calendars are shared between everyone). It can work on your personal email only if all attendees have shared their calendars.
We are so committed to enabling effective and impactful time management that we we are incorporating weekly defragmentation (optimize week), metrics on how you and your team spend your time weekly, automatic scheduling with external entities (i.e. automate your hiring candidate scheduling) and incorporating Pomodoro directly into Katella for serious disciplined GSD that’ll elevate you and your team.
Katella Defrag is currently in Beta. Sign up for it below.
