Sometimes even an obvious idea is a bad idea. Take the case of automatic meeting schedulers (Grudin 1990). Everyone knows that setting up a meeting can be tedious and frustrating, typically involving proposals, counterproposals, iterative checking, and confirming. This is just the sort of troublesome activity that computers should be able to help with let the computer discover and solve the constraints imposed by conflicting schedules. But for such a system to work, it is important that all prospective attendees enter and maintain their personal schedules.

To the contrary, early studies of office work showed that electronic calendars are used largely by managers or executives as a communication tool for keeping their staff informed and oriented (Ehrlich 1987a, 1987b). Meetings are scheduled by secretaries on behalf of their bosses. This means that automating the scheduling task has clear payoffs for bosses and their secretaries. But for other employees, the payoff is that they are more easily summoned to meetings! Unless electronic calendars provide attractive services for the individual user sufficient to warrant the data entry and modification needed to maintain an online calendar the evident need for automated scheduling will remain a vexing problem.