Tell your boss to get bent with Google's 'working hours' feature
You work a 9-to-5, and yet some jerk in the office keeps scheduling you for 8 a.m. meetings.
This madness has to stop, and, thanks to Google's new Working Hours feature that prevents people from adding you to meetings on Google Calendar outside of your pre-set available times, it just might. JK, your bosses are going to do whatever the hell they want with your time, but the new feature is at least a wonderfully passive-aggressive way to tell them to get bent.
Working Hours, announced by Google on June 27, is pretty straightforward.
"People who will try to schedule meetings with you outside of these hours will be informed that you are not available at that time," explains the company's blog post. "You can already set your working hours to one interval for all days of the week. With this launch, you can now customize your work hours for each day separately."
This is just the latest addition in a series of mindfulness features rolled out by tech giants over the past year. Think of Apple's "Do Not Disturb during Bedtime," or Screen Time. Or all the nonsense from Facebook about "time well spent."
The problem, tech's message seems to be, is not with our hyper-connected society and definitely not with our addictive products, but rather that you don't have enough features to use the products the right way.
Well, now you do. So, go ahead and set your working hours as 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Google Calendar. It is, after all, the best way to ensure that your boss texts you at 7:30 a.m. wondering why the hell he can't add you to that 8 a.m. meeting.
Topics Google
