One of the most shocking things I experience while going through the interview process with Amazon was the lack of technology used in the process of scheduling the actual times to talk. I'm sure they have their reasons for operating the way they do. Jeff Bezos doesn't seem like the type to let such an inefficiency slip, I just thought it was interesting that I had a point of contact for job related questions and a different point of contact for scheduling my interviews. Two separate humans.
The reason this is on my mind is because I've been meeting up with a ton of people since I've been back in Seattle and it's been interesting to see how everyone goes about scheduling their time. Booking their time. Arranging their time. Managing their time. It's only the most important thing we do...So I've been watching and taking notes, the results have been interesting.
The first thing that really struck me, for which I now have a hypothesis, is that my generation seems to have skipped email for personal use and all of the calendar tools that came with it. We had email in high school but we had it so early on that when Facebook came around (my Sophomore year of high school) email quickly became a distant, stuffy tool that we were forced to use in order to communicate with old people (who would undoubtedly respond with some sort of message that brought fear or the fear of more homework). And in that transition, similar to the transition from home phones to cell phones (which yes! I did live through!), we completely lost touch with the need or ability to remember anyones email address. I now know about...3 peoples email addresses by heart. Maybe 10 because I have my own business so I know most of them are laid out like: firstname@onlythebeat.com. Still, I'd be guessing.
For the sake of trying to keep these posts short and easy to digest, I'll cut to the chase and provide you with two, yes TWO amazing Google Chrome extensions that you can add to your gmail inbox in order to start managing your time better today:
Both are pretty cool...The only real difference I've seen, being on both side of the user experience, is that Assistant keeps the experience in your receivers gmail inbox while Calendly takes them to a web-based landing page. This is for a good reason though. If you upgrade to the paid version of Calendly that landing page can provide different options for the user, such as "Book a 15 min design critique" or "Are you my client? Book a 30 min chat." It makes sense to move the experience once more options are involved. I also give the design award to Calendly, recently removing Assistant.to from my gmail inbox because of some frustrations with how it was cluttering my emails.
I have to run! Check back for more tomorrow :)
p.s. the OTB Instagram is up to 2,335 followers (see Crowdfire)
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