A calendar analyzer that uses artificial intelligence has the ability to make us more productive. It's part of the changing workplace as we Build A Better Bay Area.
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Juggling meetings and finding private time to focus on projects have never been tougher. Co-workers are working from home. Some are even working from other states and countries. Now there's help -- a platform called Clockwise.
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"What Clockwise will do is actually automatically look for the best time for that event on your calendar and the calendars of the attendees by a series of algorithms and artificial intelligence" explained Alexandra Moser, head of business operations at Clockwise.
The San Francisco-based company is trying to address this startling research: 41% of our work day is wasted time, spent on email, collaboration tools like Slack, and dead time between meetings. The result is a loss of productivity.
"We'd always be canceling meetings. There's just nowhere to fit it. No good time to find that one-on-one, so a lot of it would slip, and a lot of that's not happening now," said Jeff Gibson. He is an engineering manager at Atlassian, a global software company whose 5,000 employees in California, India and Australia started using Clockwise three months ago. Atlassian, as a company, has been using Clockwise for a longer period of time.
What he likes best is how it re-arranges his calendar so there are blocks of time he dubs "focus time" to tackle complex projects and problems.
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"I think engineers, it's especially difficult for them to like really focus on a problem. They need multiple hours of kind of uninterrupted time," said Gibson.
For anyone worried this amounts to snooping, it's artificial intelligence, not a person, identifying wasted time. You can also opt out. However, for employees also dealing with work from home child care duties and unexpected issues, the platform can be a real help.
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"Clockwise will automatically move the meetings that might have been in conflict with that childcare block to other times that work, so it makes that really, really simple," Moser said.
Another company using Clockwise found that its employees gained one and a half hours of additional time for meetings per week, an increase of 12%.
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