Hello, World
Welcome to Kron’s Agenda, the blog for Kronistic, Inc. Kronistic is a startup founded in summer 2022. We’re building a dynamic, automatic AI scheduling assistant. So you could say this is a blog about technology! Futurism! TIME AND SPACE ITSELF!
And it is about time and space. Specifically, the time and space we humans spend to arrange meetings. So while Kron is an AI, your humble blog author is a plain old human.
I’m Emily, Kronistic cofounder & CEO. Right now I’m working in the world of startups and technology, but my background is a far cry from your typical Silicon Valley founder. Before joining the Kronistic team, I worked for over a decade as an administrative assistant and program manager in higher education.
Calendars, scheduling, and meetings have always been a huge part of my professional life. I’m willing to bet you have meetings, too.
Meetings take a lot of time.
Odds are you spend a lot of time on meetings. And I don’t just mean the time you spend in meetings – the time that you are sitting with your colleagues (or maybe your video camera) talking about work (or maybe being talked at). I also mean the time you spend on those meetings – scheduling them, planning them, reminding others about them. There’s the meeting-before-the-meeting huddle with allies and the post-meeting debrief with friends.
If you work or volunteer, you have meetings. Some people are in meetings 30+ hours a week. Others have meetings only rarely, with more time focused on individual work or real-time customer service. No matter your role, meetings are a fact of modern life.
Why do we have meetings?
We meet because communication and connection are the core of human enterprise. Meetings are the time that collaborators carve out to talk to one another about something that matters (to whoever called the meeting).
That’s a lofty idea. If it’s true, why do people hate meetings so much? Why do they often feel like a waste of time? Why are they so annoying to schedule?
This is a blog about scheduling meetings – the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Sometimes we’ll talk about business and efficiency – best practices, tips & tricks, and the like. But other times we’ll explore the social and political realities that make implementing those best practices hard. Because scheduling meetings is hard. And part of the pain is the sneaking suspicion that it shouldn’t have to be this hard to “just” find a time.
There are plenty of tools that are working to ease the pain of scheduling. Kronistic is one of them. We are building Kron because we think an AI could beat a human at a competitive game of calendar tetris. If we’re right, Kron can take over calendar tetris for people so we can focus on everything else – including making sure the meetings we schedule are productive and impactful, instead of just another block in the puzzle.
Because even with a tool like Kronistic to help with scheduling, meetings are challenging. And that’s because they’re fundamentally about people, and people are complicated!
Meetings can be great! But they cost our most precious resource: time.
It’s hard to imagine collaborative, productive work without any meetings ever. As much as we all bemoan the meeting-that-should-have-been-an-email, there’s also the disastrous email-that-should-have-been-a-meeting.
Once you’ve decided to hold a meeting, there are more decisions to be made. Things like who should attend the meeting and how long it should be may seem simple, but they can often be loaded, political, delicate topics. Why? Because you are deciding how to spend time. Not just your own, but other people’s. Whose time are you spending? How much, when, and why? Who gets to make all these decisions, anyway?
I don’t have the answers. I doubt anybody does. But if you find the questions as fascinating as I do, follow the Kron Blog and join our community. Let’s work together to understand these big questions, so we can make better and more deliberate choices about our answers.