In this paper, we report on findings from an ethnographic study of how people use their calendars for personal information management (PIM). Our participants were faculty, staff and students who were not required to use or contribute to any specific calendaring solution, but chose to do so anyway. The study was conducted in three parts: first, an initial survey provided broad insights into how calendars were used; second, this was followed up with personal interviews of a few participants which were transcribed and content-analyzed; and third, examples of calendar artifacts were collected to inform our analysis. Findings from our study include the use of multiple reminder alarms, the reliance on paper calendars even among regular users of electronic calendars, and wide use of calendars for reporting and life-archival purposes. We conclude the paper with a discussion of what these imply for designers of interactive calendar systems and future work in PIM research.
Nearly 10 years after Kelley and Chapanis' original study, Payne @cite_19 conducted interviews with 30 knowledge workers about both calendars and to-do lists, followed by a task analysis of his observations. He concluded that the central task supported by calendars was . Prospective remembering is the use of memory for remembering to do things in the future, as different from retrospective memory functions such as recalling past events.
@cite_19
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This article is an interview study of calendar use and a cognitive analysis of the interactions between the design of calendars and the task of prospective remembering. The study and analysis are coordinated to present a general critique of current electronic calendar designs and to note opportunities for future designs. The interview data reveal continued use of paper calendars in a highly computerized setting. A key conclusion is that paper calendars support prospective remembering by promoting browsing of existing appointments during subsequent calendar keeping but that this advantage is compromised in current electronic designs. Other aspects of the interviews and the analyses address the representational limitations of both paper and electronic calendars. This research explores a methodology in which design implications of qualitative empirical data are understood and systematized through theoretical analyses of existing artifacts. A rapidly growing number of recent studies show that imagining the future depends on much of the same neural machinery that is needed for remembering the past. These findings have led to the concept of the prospective brain; an idea that a crucial function of the brain is to use stored information to imagine, simulate and predict possible future events. We suggest that processes such as memory can be productively re-conceptualized in light of this idea. Twenty-three professional persons were interviewed extensively to find out how they keep their appointment calendars and to extract from that information suggestions about how calendars could be computerized. For the majority of the persons interviewed calendars are indispensable to the conduct of their business, and, in some cases, their personal lives. At the same time the data show an unexpectedly large amount of diversity in the kinds of calendars people use and in the ways they use them. Substantially more than half of the respondents have more than one calendar, with two persons using as many as six calendars at once. Portability and access from diverse locations are important for many persons. Concerns about privacy vary widely: some persons keep their calendars closely guarded, others allow free access to them. Relevant time spans covered by calendars are enormous. Some few people are concerned only with the current day and the day following, others may plan appointments a year or more in advance. A substantial number of appointments are changed after they have been made and, once again, the range is large, from about 2 per cent for some persons to about 80 per cent for others. Archiving, query patterns, and the insertion of correlated information into calendars also vary greatly among various users. Modern enterprises are replete with numerous online processes. Many must be performed frequently and are tedious, while others are done less frequently yet are complex or hard to remember. We present interviews with knowledge workers that reveal a need for mechanisms to automate the execution of and to share knowledge about these processes. In response, we have developed the CoScripter system (formerly Koala [11]), a collaborative scripting environment for recording, automating, and sharing web-based processes. We have deployed CoScripter within a large corporation for more than 10 months. Through usage log analysis and interviews with users, we show that CoScripter has addressed many user automation and sharing needs, to the extent that more than 50 employees have voluntarily incorporated it into their work practice. We also present ways people have used CoScripter and general issues for tools that support automation and sharing of how-to knowledge.