Are calendars actually helping us manage our time?

I've been thinking a lot about calendars lately.

Most calendars are really good at telling us what is happening:

• meetings

• appointments

• events

• deadlines

But I'm not sure they are equally good at helping us answer a different question:

“What should I actually do with the time I have?”

For example, imagine your day already contains:

2 hours of meetings
3 hours of focused work
a few tasks that are due today
a workout
a personal appointment
and several things that unexpectedly come up.

The calendar can show all of this, but you still have to manually figure out how everything fits together.

That's the problem I'm exploring with DayKite.

The idea is to move beyond a calendar that simply records events toward a system that helps you actually manage your time — things like:

• planning your day and week

• protecting focus time

• managing routines

• balancing personal and work commitments

• finding available time

• eventually automating parts of scheduling and rescheduling

I'm curious how other people think about this.

What is the biggest thing your current calendar doesn't help you with?

Is it planning your day?
Protecting focus time?
Managing multiple calendars?
Recurring routines?
Scheduling around tasks?
Or something completely different?

I'm especially interested in what you think a calendar should be doing for you automatically that it doesn't do today.