Travel Time

One thing I do with my calendar, that I don’t see anyone else do, is I include travel time. This actually makes calendaring very complicated, because it’s not a native part of the various calendar applications.

For instance, if Mr. Everyman has a doctor’s appointment at 11:30am, he probably make a calendar entry “DOCTOR” starting 11:30, ending at noon or 12:30, depending on the circumstances.

For me that calendar entry would start at 10:30am, and end at 1:30 or 2pm, and be labeled, “DOCTOR 11:30”. This gives me an hour travel window on each side, and also takes into account an involved visit or perhaps a side trip to get a prescription filled.

I feel doing it this way is necessary, so that I can see possible conflicts, without diving into the details of every appointment. Just from the blocks of time I can tell instantly.

Where this often creates a problem, is that the wonderful advanced wizards built into our calendaring programs want to helpfully pull any date-like values from the text and create/adjust the start time based on them. So I put start time at 10:30, and then write “doctor 11:30” and the wizard changes the start time on me. It is possible to get around this usually by formatting the time in the text strange enough for the wizard to not recognize it. But what a pain.

Another shortcoming is that I can’t tell easily when an appointment actually does start. Talk about wanting to have my cake and eat it too.. This method also matches up poorly when I sync or import other calendars, which of course don’t abide by such a convention, or when others want to access my calendar, and can’t figure it out.

I’m not expecting any solutions to this dilemma, I just wanted to point it out, as I’m usually campaigning for simplifying these global PIM tools so that we can have better standardization, but here I am looking for a whole new layer of fields. Classic!