Calendar Tools

Abstract

The focus of this chapter is to review electronic time management or calendar tools. This review is presented to support the underlying motivation for this book, which is to improve time management by providing better electronic time management or calendar tools that incorporate more types of temporal structures than those being managed with existing tools. The chapter begins with a discussion of paper-based calendars, which have served as the primary structure for representing time usage for all subsequent time management aids. This discussion relates time management practices to the types of temporal structures the paper calendar manipulates and to the paper calendar successor, the electronic calendar. A comparison is made between the advantages of paper-based tools and electronic tools to illustrate the types of advantages that were moving to electronic means. This comparison is also made to illustrate that the advantages developed for the electronic time manager are simplistic and somewhat obvious, such as simplifying repeated entries and announcing time-based events.