Each year, humpback whales spend the summer feeding in the fertile waters of the Arctic. When winter arrives, and the fish become scarce, they travel 5,000 miles to their familiar breeding grounds in tropical waters. Similarly, when the posts about Tigers, Miami or VCs’ topless selfies have run dry, ‘Tech Twitter’ returns to the comfort of debating the etiquette of sending a Calendly link:
For the uninitiated, Calendly is a tool that lets you send out a link to someone so they can book a time directly on your calendar, without the rigmarole of the email back and forth. Though other brands are available, Calendly is the biggest and most popular. While it definitely makes life easier, there is obviously some debate on whether it’s a bit rude?
As this blog post nicely summarises, the main problem is that while it may save time in aggregate, it moves all the effort onto the person who needs to book the meeting. As a result, it can come across a bit impersonal. And if you’re the person who is asking for the meeting it’s probably on you to put the work in, so a Calendly link might not be the best option.
So in that vein, I want to offer you a simple alternative. It’s designed for when you really want someone to agree to a meeting — whether that’s a friend with a notoriously packed social schedule or former acquaintances that you want to share exciting business opportunities with. It’s completely free — you can try it out and create your own calendar links without even making an account. (Though if you need any enterprise features, please do get in contact with our sales team.)
Hopefully, this will solve some of your current meeting scheduling problems. And then replace them with completely new ones.
So, without further ado, here’s “I’m booking you”:
I hope you enjoy it.
About “I’m booking you”:
Obviously, we (me, Reda and Reuben) had a lot of fun — mostly just playing around with various CSS transformations. If you liked it, I would also highly recommend the “Bad UI Battles” subreddit. And, if you were wondering where our original inspiration came from, look no further than this incredibly nostalgic piece of internet history:
If you’ve got any fun suggestions, definitely let us know. We’d be up for adding/changing/removing features if anything makes us laugh.
If you enjoyed it, feel free to share it with your friends/colleagues/HR departments.
If you hated it, close the tab.
About Not Fun at Parties:
This “newsletter” is a fairly odd mix of tech, data, economics and stupid stuff (like this). I’m aiming for each post to have an attached “thing I’ve made”, mostly to give me an excuse to try out new tech. If that sounds like your bag, let me send you emails: