# Calendar.help: Designing a Workflow-Based Scheduling Agent with Humans in the Loop

## TL;DR

Calendar.help is a workflow-based email scheduling system that combines automation and human assistance to efficiently manage meeting arrangements, reducing user effort and improving productivity.

## Contribution

It introduces a novel structured workflow approach for scheduling that integrates automation with human-in-the-loop assistance, enabling efficient handling of diverse scenarios.

## Key findings

- Automated workflows handle common scheduling tasks efficiently.
- Human-in-the-loop fallback manages complex or unusual cases.
- System improves scheduling speed and user productivity.

## Abstract

Although information workers may complain about meetings, they are an essential part of their work life. Consequently, busy people spend a significant amount of time scheduling meetings. We present Calendar.help, a system that provides fast, efficient scheduling through structured workflows. Users interact with the system via email, delegating their scheduling needs to the system as if it were a human personal assistant. Common scheduling scenarios are broken down using well-defined workflows and completed as a series of microtasks that are automated when possible and executed by a human otherwise. Unusual scenarios fall back to a trained human assistant who executes them as unstructured macrotasks. We describe the iterative approach we used to develop Calendar.help, and share the lessons learned from scheduling thousands of meetings during a year of real-world deployments. Our findings provide insight into how complex information tasks can be broken down into repeatable components that can be executed efficiently to improve productivity.