Why can’t I pencil an appointment into my digital calendar?

When I used a paper Day-Timer organizer – which I did for nearly 20 years – I clearly understood the difference between writing something into my appointment calendar, and penciling something into my appointment calendar.

When you write something into your calendar, the assumption is that it’s a commitment.

Sure, you might erase or change it, but if you wrote in “Lunch next Tuesday, 1:00pm, Red Robin, with Bob,” the assumption is that unless you hear otherwise, you’re going to show up at 1:00pm and expect to find Bob there.

By contrast, penciling something in means that you’re putting a hold on the date.

If you pencil it in, it’s clearly not confirmed that you’re having lunch with Bob, or that it’ll be on Tuesday at 1:00pm. You’re just making a notation in your calendar so that you’ll be reminded to follow up later.

Why is it that calendar software doesn’t understand the difference between a confirmed appointment and a tentative one? Sure, you can add in descriptive text: “Lunch with Bob – tbc” is what I usually type, with “tbc” meaning “to be confirmed.” However, that entry in iCal or Google Calendar, or on my BlackBerry, looks exactly the same, whether it’s a tbc or not.

In other words, I can’t see at a glance which appointments in my calendar are definite vs. penciled. I have to read the text and look for that “tbc.” I can’t easily see an actionable list of unconfirmed events, unless I do a text search. Nor am I prompted by the software to confirm tentative appointments: the software doesn’t understand the concept.

What would I like? Perhaps a check box for “tentative” in the calendar software. Perhaps two buttons for when you create or edit an appointment, one marked “ink” and the other “pencil.” Definitely we need a visual cue that tell me, at a glance, that while I have some stuff set up for next Tuesday, some is confirmed and some is not. And yes, programmatic pop-ups or other prompts that remind me that I need to confirm things, and make it easier to confirm something other than editing the description to remove the “tbc” text.

C’mon – there’s a reason why we say, “Okay, Bob, I’ll pencil you in for Tuesday.” Let’s get the calendar metaphor right.

>> Update 12/6: Another point is that the difference between confirmed and tentative events should be clear when viewing events on a graphical page, like week-at-a-glance.