Woven, the Driver-Assist Calendar

Time often seems to slip away from us. For many knowledge workers, time drives our entire day, determining not just our location, but our focus. At Woven, we’re reimagining time and reinventing time management. In a sense, Woven is a self-driving calendar, but it keeps its users squarely in the driver’s seat.

Automating Mundanity
When I reference self-driving technology I’m not talking about attempts to create fully autonomous self-driving cars, but rather the technology we generally call driver assistance. While driver-assistance technology hasn’t gotten as much press, it’s actually a collection of exciting innovations that is transforming the way we get from one place to another.

Many new vehicles have some form of driver assistance. From automated parallel parking to rear view video streams, adaptive cruise control, lane departure, and collision avoidance, these technologies not only make driving easier, they protect us. They eliminate blind spots and alert us to dangers we might not have been conscious of. Ultimately, they help us minimize human error and drive more safely by creating trust. By reliably automating certain tasks, these features allow drivers to engage more directly with where they’re going rather than how to get there.

And, unlike fully-autonomous cars, driver assistance is here, today. Instead of waiting indefinitely, we can incorporate a multitude of assistive features to make our travel safer, more efficient, and even more fun.

Steering Your Calendar
Like cars with driver-assist features, Woven empowers its users to spend time on what matters most, one event at a time. The app uses artificial intelligence and a graph engine to pull together every stage of an event — the planning, scheduling, preparation, meeting, and follow-up — into one view. It works seamlessly throughout the day and takes the frustration out of necessary tasks. With Woven helping users weave together all the elements of an event, they spend more time on big-picture ideas than traditional minutiae.

Woven is not like other calendars I’ve used. I look at it not just to know where to go, but to identify the best route, when to leave to be on time (thanks to Maps), what documents I’ll need to prepare, and so on. I use it during meetings to take notes and to track collaborative communications like emails and messages. After the meeting, it becomes a reference of what took place.

My calendar, then, is not simply a list of events; it’s a collaborative connection between people, information and a particular event. It’s the organizing factor — the headquarters where I begin, engage in, and conclude my work. Like driver assistance, it helps me anticipate what’s coming down the road and adjusts to accommodate unexpected obstacles.

Delegating Tasks Without Relinquishing Control
Just like with automatic braking, it takes time to get accustomed to these assistive technologies and to grasp how powerful they really are. As we quickly adopt the seismic shifts going on in enterprise productivity, calendars are the logical next step. It’s crucial to identify what tasks can be delegated and which require a personal touch.

That’s why we created the Woven Assistant, which intentionally lacks a human name. Sometimes delegating tasks to another individual can seem intrusive, but Woven Assistant is merely an intuitive artificial intelligence construct that can help you organize and streamline communications around scheduling. For instance, by including “@woven” in scheduling emails, users can ask the assistant to help in finding good times for meetings. And, the Woven Assistant can find and import potential events directly into Woven without having to open email, or another app.

Starting with these simple tasks allows users to develop a sense of trust in the intelligence, not unlike relying on surround cameras to park a car safely. It may seem odd to cultivate trust in a calendar app, but that’s exactly what needs to happen to free up valuable brain space. Instead of staring at lane dividers, Woven lets users be more focused on where they are going and why.