Led design for a YC-backed productivity app that reimagined the calendar as a place to prioritise work. It combined task tracking and scheduling to help teams reclaim focus time and get things done.
Focus time Ask busy people when they do their real work, and you'll hear the same answer: in the evening. Their days fill with meetings broken up by half-hour gaps, so the time for deep work is there, but never in stretches long enough to survive a context switch. Aerotime put focus time on the calendar as its own entity, so the product could safeguard it as your week evolved. People told us they won back up to 20% of their day.
Scheduling automated Most of the work in scheduling is negotiation. It's either endless 'how about 3 pm?' emails, or a scheduling link that comes off as impersonal. So that's what we took on. Users added who to meet, and Aerotime found the times that worked best for everyone. Existing meetings could be marked as Flexible, so they could automatically move to the least interruptive time. Fewer meetings at better times, and focus blocks long enough to get things done.
Tasks Work turns up in a dozen places. A thread in Slack, a ticket in Linear, an email that quietly becomes a task. In Aerotime all of these appeared in a unified Inbox, letting users prioritise their work and make time for it. Tasks that needed uninterrupted attention had focus blocks waiting for them.
Result Over three years, Aerotime went from Chrome extension to polished Mac app. In the end, it didn't get enough traction. The product was a vitamin more than a painkiller. Calendar apps were having a moment in the early 2020s, but few survived. Many of these features are now part of AI-first workflows.
