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Work calendars are the wrong way around.
They should assume people are busy all day, and only create space for people to book meetings in slots explicitly marked as being available.
The assumption of availability created by an empty space in the calendar is backwards and contributes to people being permanently distracted and dragged into endless meetings which look and sound like work, but which often are anything but.
(I know it’s possible to - and I do - block out time on my calendar for when I need to do stuff that isn’t a meeting, my point here is about defaults, and the default calendar being an empty expanse of seemingly free time with a big inviting button saying ‘Create a Meeting’ is not a default that mirrors reality. If you need to explicitly signpost that you are doing stuff whilst at your job where you are getting paid to do stuff then the software is not serving you).
The lineage of analogue calendar to digital calendar to digital calendar visible to and editable by anyone in your company feels like a sequence of events where the UI metaphor has failed to adapt to the context. I’m not going to ‘how might we’ but I’m curious what a grounds up approach to a calendar app would be today where it is assumed that one’s calendar is visible to and editable by literally hundreds of people.
Would it start as full days into which one creates interruptions?
Would it offer insights into which meetings are recorded and therefore less critical to attend?
Would it be proactive about protecting breaks and working ones contracted hours?
Would it retroactively populate time with what you were doing so you can learn about how best to structure your days?
Would it point out that during a week of English winter one has booked meetings which occupy 85% of all available daylight hours?