My Calendar is up-to-date

I heard this phrase once or twice early in my career. Puzzlingly, I've heard it quite a few times recently.

Once upon a time, some very smart people invented technology to book meetings using the internet. These meetings would be scheduled on a virtual calendar, rather than a paper one. Remember those? Because it was such a hassle to find out a time when everyone was available to attend meetings, along came the idea of sharing our calendars within the organisation. And tools like "scheduling assistant" became commonplace.

I'm young enough that these tools have been ubiquitous in the workplace for my entire career, and old enough to see how it has affected different generations.

When I was early in my career, I understood that technology was changing for the older folk, and that it is hard to change habits. They might have been used to having a physical diary or calendar that they had to maintain. Recurring meetings would have been a manual task to schedule in. If they've come from one meeting to another and haven't yet landed on a time for their follow up meeting, then there's some administrative work to do to update their calendar. Some people might've even had personal or executive assistants. I get it.

The phrase died. It wasn't to be heard again for at least 10 years.

The internet age had boomed. Everyone and everything is now online. Automation and digital assistants are everywhere. The instantaneous era is upon us. We have access to the latest news, instantly. We can send emails, tweets, photos and videos to the entire world, instantly. You can buy things online and have them delivered the same day. You can get an email about flights, theatre bookings, or appointments, and Google has already put it in your calendar. Truly a marvel of how far we've come.

And then one day a colleague said "my calendar is up to date."

I mean, why wouldn't it be? I had to think about this one for a moment. Let's try to unpack this.

Did this person not understand how computers work? Is it an age thing? They're about the same age as me, in a tech centric role, surely that can't be the reason.

Is it a cultural thing? Do they come from a background where they had a personal assistant who managed their calendar? Maybe, but I doubt it.

I'm going to go with Occam's Razor and propose that the colleague simply wanted to push the responsibility of finding the time and booking the next meeting onto someone else.

Instead of looking at their calendar, which is instantaneously available in their pocket or on the laptop in front of them, conversing and finding a mutually agreeable time, said colleague chose to make finding the time someone else's problem.

In another instance, someone from outside my organisation told me "my calendar is up to date".

I was more puzzled than the first. Did this person not know that their calendar is not shared externally? So I asked. Of course they knew. It was clear that they didn't want to spend a moment to make the time.

"My calendar is up to date" is really a backhanded way of saying "you find the time".

Some people are genuinely busy and don't have the time to work out a mutually agreeable time for their next interaction. But there are much better ways of asking the other person to schedule the meeting. Some of them are so simple, such as:

"I'm really busy and have to shoot off to my next meeting, can I ask you to find a time and schedule our next meeting?"

Everyone knows how to use the scheduling assistant tools these days, so there's no need to imply who should schedule the meeting and where to check availability.

It rubs people the wrong way and leaves a gritty after-taste. It smacks of self importance.

So next time you're wrapping up a meeting and organising a follow-up, don't be that person. Wrap it up politely, or make the effort to find a time. Simply saying nothing would be better than "my calendar is up to date".

Postscript

Ironically, the colleague who always says "my calendar is up to date", more often than not, books meetings that clash with existing meetings.

Does this person really not know how to use the scheduling assistant that they are so intent on implying that others should use? Or does this person really have such a high perception of themselves, expecting others to move existing meetings to accommodate?

A mystery that may never be fully explained.