Calendaring Across Home/Work Boundaries

Summer 2006
Advisor: Dr. A.J. Brush
Microsoft Research, Community Technologies Group

Working parents typically have the task of balancing their work and personal schedules. For example, parents may need to negotiate their child's sports schedules, music lessons, or day care scheudle with events that are scheduled at work (e.g. meetings and out-of-town travel). In this project, we examined how working parents' personal and work lives overlap and how that affects the way they schedule their time and subsequently use calendaring tools (e.g. paper and electronic calendars, sticky notes, etc.)

We conducted a qualitative study in which we interviewed 15 working parents (both male and female) about how they schedule their time. In addition, we analyzed the calendaring tools of each participant. We analyzed the results using the affinity diagramming technique from the Contextual Design method.