Calendar.help: Designing a Workflow-Based Scheduling Agent with Humans in the Loop
This addresses productivity issues for busy professionals by automating scheduling tasks, though it is incremental as it builds on existing workflow and human-in-the-loop concepts.
The authors tackled the problem of time-consuming meeting scheduling for information workers by developing Calendar.help, a workflow-based system that uses email interaction and combines automation with human assistance, resulting in scheduling thousands of meetings over a year in real-world deployments.
Although information workers may complain about meetings, they are an essential part of their work life. Consequently, busy people spend a significant amount of time scheduling meetings. We present Calendar.help, a system that provides fast, efficient scheduling through structured workflows. Users interact with the system via email, delegating their scheduling needs to the system as if it were a human personal assistant. Common scheduling scenarios are broken down using well-defined workflows and completed as a series of microtasks that are automated when possible and executed by a human otherwise. Unusual scenarios fall back to a trained human assistant who executes them as unstructured macrotasks. We describe the iterative approach we used to develop Calendar.help, and share the lessons learned from scheduling thousands of meetings during a year of real-world deployments. Our findings provide insight into how complex information tasks can be broken down into repeatable components that can be executed efficiently to improve productivity.