Have you ever wondered what your meetings look like in 3D? Well, you need wait no longer. No lie: it’s pretty cool. Laurel Woerner – Work Futurist.

This image displays all of my meetings for 2018, visualized as dots and lines.  Each dot (node) represents a person, and the size is determined by how often you met with them. Lines (edges) appear when two people participated in the same meeting. If you see dots with the same color, that means they’re from the same organization (their emails are the same domain). We’ve been running analyses on our own calendars using data visualization tool Plotly to illustrate the relationship between yourself and all the people you meet with. Some willing Time Lords shared theirs as well.  We noticed a few intriguing trends: Similar roles have similar calendar shapes. If you’re a university professor, the way you work and the types of meetings you have will be pretty similar to other university professors. Whether your 3D calendar looks like an exploding star, a lumpy tomato, or a tinkertoy, your role will be a key factor in determining the shape. Same role tends to mean the same shape. Industry doesn’t matter.  Industry tells us relatively little about the kind of work you’re doing day to day, especially if you are a knowledge worker. A sales rep for a pharmaceutical company has more in common with a sales rep for a SaaS company than they do with a researcher within their same company, focused on lab work. We can use these graphs to help us prioritize.  When you see your time condensed and laid out in a new way, you might notice patterns you hadn’t before. If you scheduled a ton of meetings with a team that just isn’t your priority or met only once with that client who seemed promising, a 3D view of your calendar data might surface those misalignments…”