Calendars are the worst. They are the scourge of modern life.
Whoa PJ, pump the brakes. You’re clearly overreacting.
Okay yes I’m overreacting. Logically, there are so many things worse than calendars. COVID for example. It’s way worse than calendars. Climate change! Climate change is worse than calendars, handily, by like a very large margin. Calendars are not in the same category of horrifying.
Alright, but calendars are still death by a thousand cuts. In my face. All. Day. Long.
Let me back up.
When I was a kid and I wanted to talk to somebody, I called them on the phone. Here’s how that worked:
Me: Ring ring
Brad’s house: Hello?
Me: Hi is Brad home?
Brad’s house: Oh hi PJ, no Bradden is playing street hockey outside
Me: K, can you tell him to call me please?
Brad’s house: Sure dear
<Later>
Brad’s house: Ring ring
My house: Hello?
Brad’s house: Hi it’s Brad is PJ there?
My house: Oh hi Bradden dear! No PJ isn’t here … didn’t he go over to your place?
Brad: K
<Later>
PJ dear Bradden called!
Me: K mom!
Me: Ring ring
Brad’s house: Hello?
Me: Hi Brad!
Brad: What the fuck do you want PJ?
Okay yes Brad was an asshole and a troll and I still have nightmares about that kid. But I digress.
My point is, this is how it used to be for me when I wanted to talk to Brad, or Jessica, or Sean, or whoever else I wanted to talk to. (Actually I rarely wanted to talk to people, but when it was necessary this is how it worked.)
Why were we calling back and forth like this? We really didn’t have another choice. But if our moms weren’t around, it would have been even worse. It would have been calling, no answer, over and over. Until someone answered.
Fast forward to today. When I want to talk to my friend Jamie, here’s how that goes:
Me <text>: yo Jamie
<3 days later>
Jamie <text>: sup PJ
<2 days later>
Me <text>: Jamie!
<1 day later>
Jamie <text>: PJ!
Me <text>: Jamie I wanna chat with you about working at Facebook.
<1 hour later>
Jamie <text>: Ya dude, when do you wanna chat? Tomorrow afternoon works prolly
<20 minutes later>
Me <text>: Hey sweet. Tomorrow afternoon I’m at the dentist. Wed eve work?
<45 minutes later>
Jamie <text>: Ya! Wed 7p works
<15 minutes later>
Me <text>: Ya dude I’ll call you then
< Wed at 7pm >
Me <text>: Jamie! Is now still a good time?
Jamie <text>: Hey shit I forgot about this. I need to reschedule! Does tomorrow work?
Me <text>: Ya does 3p tomorrow work?
Jamie <text>: No but I can do 4p!
Me <text>: I’ll make that work! I’ll ping you then
< Thurs at 4pm >
Me <text>: Jamie ready when you are my dude
Jamie <text>: Gimme 5 min
< 5 min later>
Me: Ring ring
Jamie: Hello?
Me: Jamie!
Jamie: What the fuck do you want PJ?
< J/K Jamie doesn’t talk like that >
Jamie: Hi PJ!
I call this the calendar alignment problem. If I want to drop in with someone synchronously, in real time, talking back and forth, just like old times, I’m gonna have to align my calendar with that person. Or someone is going to have to align my calendar with their calendar.
When it involves more than two people, just give up. You basically need to have someone who’s job it is to align calendars all day long. They’re called a personal assistant, or executive assistant, or virtual admin, or maybe it’s a clever AI assistant. Nobody has come up with a way of eliminating the calendar alignment step. All the calendar tech I’ve ever seen is just hacks that make it slightly less painful to do the calendar alignment. For example, Google Calendar gives you a “Find a time” interface that shows open slots common to both of your calendars. You’re still solving the alignment problem. But hey, now you’ve got a slick interface for doing it.
All the calendar tech I’ve ever seen is just hacks that make it slightly less painful to do calendar alignment.
It is SO HARD to get anything done this way. And I realized recently that the way it worked when I was a kid was actually BETTER than this.
Why? Because now we have the internet. So my mom doesn’t need to be there to take a message. Now we have servers that store data for us until we’re ready to see it. That’s called an email, or a DM. When you send me a text, it’ll get queued up on my phone for when I check it next. Instead of a mom, I have an email server and a phone. And almost everyone with a mom has an email address and a phone these days.
When I was a kid, playing phone tag with other kids, we were using a social convention: call me back. That’s all it was. And call me back when you get my message. Because otherwise you’ll forget! Because you’re 8 years old! For phone tag to work, we had to keep the tag going until someone actually answered.
In other words, there was meaning in the cadence of the phone tag. We had to converge fast enough that someone would eventually answer the phone before I forgot what I actually wanted to talk about.
There was meaning in the cadence of the phone tag.
The phone tag convention was our hack for bridging the gap between asynchronous back-and-forth, to a synchronous discussion as soon as someone actually answered the phone. And it worked! At least it did sometimes! Like maybe even most of the time! And we just accepted that not everyone was going to play phone tag. Sometimes the person just doesn’t ever answer the phone, or they don’t get the message from their mom, or they do and they don’t bother to call back. Phone tag didn’t stop people from ghosting, it just put a time limit on how fast you’d know they were ghosting.
Phone tag was our social hack for bridging the gap between asynchronous back-and-forth, to a synchronous discussion.
Yes phone tag was crazy-making. It was rudimentary. But we did it all without calendars.
Phone tag was different from text tag. Because I like to pretend that I’ll respond to a text “soon”. As soon as I “have bandwidth”. Which is just code for “ugh not now”. And then the text sits there and tortures me with that unread badge. Forever.
What’s missing with text tag is that social convention we had to use with phone tag. Everyone was aware that their personal memory was too fragile to let a tag go stale. So we could actually converge on a time to talk.
So why not add back that social convention with some additional tech? Text tag with phone tag rules: You gotta respond fast enough to keep the tag going.
Maybe it’s a simple rule: just respond at least as fast as I did. You text me, and I text you back 1 day later. So you need to respond at most a day later, to keep the tag going. Then you respond within 12 hours, so I need to respond to you within 12 hours. I respond 2 hours later. Tag you’re it: respond within 2 hours. If you don’t, we’re done. The back-and-forth has expired.
The worst-case scenario is a horrible passive-aggressive exchange where we wait until the very last second to prevent the tag from expiring. I text you, you text me back a day later. I text you back 23 hours later. You text back 22 hours later. You see where this is going. It’s going to take us like 24 iterations to get even close to converging within an hour.
The best-case scenario is pretty quick. I text you, you text back within 10 minutes. I text back within 5 minutes. Now we’re basically looking at each other’s texts at the same time, almost in real time. We might as well have a call now.
I think of phone tag as a resonance. We’re sending a signal back and forth, responding fast enough to keep it going. So I like to call text tag with phone tag rules a Resonance.
Resonance is text tag with phone tag rules: respond fast enough to keep the tag going.
It’s kinda like a game! Kids can do this. We’ve been playing phone tag since there were phones. Kids can use a Resonance just as easily as an adult can. You just need to be able to keep the resonance going. No calendar alignment needed.
Now what if I want to talk to more than one person? Send the same Resonance to a bunch of folks all at once. The first person to respond sets the pace. Everyone else needs to tag you back at least as fast as that first person did. Anyone still in the Resonance can set the next time to beat. Everyone still in the Resonance has responded fast enough. If you don’t, you’re out of the Resonance. No hard feelings! Everyone still in the Resonance at the 5 min mark gets the option of joining the call.
In fact, why not add this feature to dating apps? Maybe you can specify how fast they need to get back to you to keep the Resonance going. If you let the Resonance expire, we’re done. Boom, no more ghosting. You set the pace, you decide how fast it needs to converge for it to be worth your while. Pretty fucking empowering if you ask me.
In a dating app: you specify how fast they need to get back to you to keep the Resonance going. BOOM, no more ghosting.
Like I wrote about Iterate in a previous post, I see Resonance as a missing accessibility technology. For those of us who find calendar alignment a drag, we can make a different tradeoff. We can accept the risk of a Resonance expiring, and encapsulate a social convention in a bit of extra technology.
Next up, in part 3, I’ll talk about Inversity, the way I wished education worked today.
I’m currently in calendar alignment hell. I feel you. But I think I would be also tortured by the game of text expiring Russian Roulette. Lol. We are just over committed and over busy. Maybe the real answer is to dial it all back to where we don’t pack our calendars so full and stop exhausting ourselves? One thing is for sure, our “busy” culture is taking its toll. Thanks for always sharing your perspective. I look forward to part 3. I DO wish I could set a reminder to respond to a text later. That would be helpful.