The Behavioral Design Podcast · Samuel Salzer and Aline Holzwarth

Product Deep Dive: Calendar 🗓️

·48 min·3 clips

The better calendar would nudge deep work into the morning and push email out of it.

The joke starts with pumpkin spice lattes, then Samuel Seltzer and Aline Halsworth steer the bit back toward calendars. Aline makes the case that calendars are more interesting than they get credit for, mostly because they touch the messy way people handle time. Her own answer has a nice wrinkle: she thinks she is good at time management, but also knows she can over-manage it until the system becomes unhealthy. That tension gives the conversation its shape. If the calendar takes too much work to manage, the tool meant to help starts causing its own trouble. The practical part is meeting spacing. A better calendar setup, as they describe it, should make back-to-back meetings a little harder to create. Odd meeting times help. A 2:40 slot sounds weird coming from a person, but if the calendar offers it, the awkwardness softens. The tool takes the blame, politely, and people get nudged away from the default half-hour blocks. Reclaim is the example they sit with. Its habits feature lets recurring priorities go onto the calendar with different levels of protection. Lunch can be defended. So can deep work, with Aline liking 9 to 11 in the morning for focus. The point is not rigid control. A block can still be deleted, but deleting it stings just enough to make the tradeoff visible. They also keep the claim grounded: a recurring event can do part of this, while the product adds scheduling help and a bit more protection. The episode closes with a seasonal note, plus a reminder to subscribe, share the show, and check out Habit Weekly for community resources and practitioner access.

As heard by us

A grounded look at how calendar software can protect attention, move focus time, and soften the friction around odd meeting times.

Calendar software is usually treated as neutral infrastructure. This episode frames it as something closer to a behavioral tool, shaping how people protect attention, deal with unusual meeting times, and leave enough space for actual work.

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Why you'd press play

You can make 2:40 meetings and sacred deep-work blocks feel a little less strange.

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