Life Scheduling to Support Multiple Social Roles Andrea Grimes A.J
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Life Scheduling to Support Multiple Social Roles Andrea Grimes A.J. Brush Georgia Institute of Technology Microsoft Research 85 5th St. NW One Microsoft Way Atlanta, GA 30332 USA Redmond, WA 98052 USA [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT While the domestic and workplace settings afford different We present the results of our study of 15 working parents, scheduling behaviors, the calendar1 is a tool that is used in and how they manage their life scheduling needs, that is, both domains. Researchers have examined calendaring at how they manage their personal and professional schedules work [6,7] and at home [2,3,4] and looked in general at across settings and calendaring tools. In particular, we interactions between work and personal lives [5], but there discuss how their dual roles of parent and employee compel has been relatively little exploration of scheduling across them to record personal information on their professional these domains with the exception of Beech et al. [1]. The calendars and we detail the tensions that arise in doing so. work done by Beech et al. surveyed numerous aspects of Finally, we present suggestions for future calendaring the working parent’s life (with calendaring being just one applications that better support working parents in component), we extend that work by taking an in-depth managing their life scheduling needs. look at the way that individuals’ personal scheduling needs come into the workplace. Author Keywords Calendars, groupware, social roles. We conducted 15 interviews and analyzed over 1400 events from our participants’ calendars to understand how working ACM Classification Keywords parents engage in life scheduling, that is, the holistic H.5.3. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): management of personal, family, and professional Group and organization interfaces. schedules across settings and calendaring tools. In this paper we describe how and why parents move scheduling INTRODUCTION information from the personal to the professional realm of During the course of each day, people move between life, and the challenges that arise in doing so. Furthermore, numerous social roles that can in turn influence how they we will discuss implications for the design of workplace use technology. As networked applications make personal calendaring software that adjusts to support the needs that information more easily accessible to others, people adjust result from individuals’ multiple social roles. how they use these applications based on the expectations associated with their varied social roles. The workplace is METHOD one setting where the personal and professional aspects of We interviewed 15 people (8 men and 7 women) working one’s life may come into conflict. For example, when in a variety of occupations in the Seattle, WA area. We individuals make their private music libraries accessible to recruited participants that had at least one child aged 4-17 coworkers, they may intentionally include or exclude and in school because they were likely to have a diverse certain tracks to craft a certain work-appropriate image [8]. range of scheduling concerns stemming from their need to Managing one’s calendar is another place where manage their own appointments and those of their children. individuals, particularly parents, must balance multiple While our participants varied in the control they had over roles. Previous research on working parents has identified their work schedules, all had control over what they chose the need to manage family and work as the defining feature to put on their calendars and who had access to it. of the working parent’s life [1] while surveys [2,4] have During the interview, participants showed us their work and revealed challenges individuals faced around synchronizing family calendars (10 of 15 participants maintained separate multiple calendars and sharing calendars. ones), shared with us how they use these calendars to manage their personal and family activities, and described the appointments on multiple days of their calendar(s). We used affinity diagramming to derive themes from the Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are interviews. We also collected printouts and copies of two not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, 1 or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior As our study focused on scheduling practices in the USA, we use the specific permission and/or a fee. American term ‘calendar’ in this paper to refer to a tool that denotes days CHI 2008, April 5–10, 2008, Florence, Italy. of the year and which is used to manage appointments. Copyright 2008 ACM 978-1-60558-011-1/08/04…$5.00. months (one winter and one summer) of calendar data from Reasons for Including Personal Information as many participants as possible. We obtained professional Being Reminded of Personal Events calendars from 12 participants and family calendars from 7 Calendars are clearly reminding tools, but we found it participants and examined a total of 1474 events. Most of interesting that some participants felt that their work the participants who did not provide us with their calendar calendar was a more effective memory aid than their family data were concerned with us maintaining records of their calendar for personal events. This seemed to be because the personal or business-confidential information. All of our work calendar is visible more often, allowing them to participants used the Microsoft Outlook™ calendaring explicitly look up events and to be reminded of upcoming application at work and varied in the tools they used for events while browsing their calendar. Having personal their family calendars (most used paper calendars but one information on the work calendar also supported person used Outlook). individuals in keeping their spouse informed of upcoming We analyzed the calendars by looking at the nature (e.g. activities. For example, P15’s husband asks her to remind personal versus work-related entries) and quantity of the him of his appointments so she includes these events in her events (not including pre-printed ones) on our participants’ work calendar. P14 and her husband communicate during work and family calendars. We also counted what types of the day to keep each other aware of new appointments and scheduling information moved from one domain to another to remind one another of existing appointments. (e.g. personal events on the work calendar), using a Having children was a primary reason for why our conservative approach. For example, events on the work participants put personal events on their professional calendar were assumed to be professional events unless calendar. Of the 397 personal events we found across our they were clearly personal based on discussions in the participants’ work calendars, 26% of these personal events interview (and vice versa for family calendars). clearly related to their children (103 of 397). Our participants put these events on their calendars to keep BALANCING THE PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL themselves aware of what was going on in their children’s Our participants’ life scheduling practices were lives. For P1, the benefit of having her son’s schedule on characterized by how they allowed scheduling information her work calendar is that she has numerous opportunities to to flow between their personal and professional lives and be reminded of upcoming events. She noted, “If I had among family members. The most extensive flow was [more of my son’s schedule] in my Outlook calendar, if I personal information moving into the professional realm of was reminded throughout the day then I could kind of life, and it is here that we will focus our discussion for the prepare or plan a little bit better.” Parents also record remainder of the paper. In particular, we will describe how events they are not attending, for example P4 included the dual roles of parent and employee affect the ways that much of his daughter’s soccer schedule on his calendar so our participants use workplace calendaring tools, and the that he could keep up with what was going on in her life, breakdowns that occur during this use. even though he did not plan to attend most of them. Overall, participants were liberal in the amount of personal information they placed on their professional calendars. Of Workplace as Scheduling Sanctuary the 1031 events we examined on work calendars, 397 were We were surprised to see that many of our participants personal (39%). In fact, we saw almost four times more preferred planning and recording personal appointments in personal events on professional calendars as professional the workplace environment. Some individuals in our study events on family calendars. Three of the five participants took time during their workday to plan personal that maintained only one calendar (that is, they did not have appointments (e.g. family outings and medical visits) and separate family and professional calendars) shared their received event updates that led them to record much of that calendars with us and an average of 60% of their events information directly onto their work calendar. P14 relies on were of a personal nature. Nine of the ten participants who the calm of work to manage her personal and family maintained both a personal and professional calendar appointments: “I find scheduling things after [work] hours shared their calendars with us, and an average of 25% of – I really don’t like doing it. I’d rather do it at work, when their events were personal. Examples of the types of I’m sitting here, because that way my calendar is right personal scheduling information that people placed on their here… This is the only free time I get to actually sit down professional calendar include social activities, sporting and get to schedule anything or plan anything.