Perfect days. A benevolent calendar to take back your time

“Time poverty” touches upon a tension between the ever increasing time demands of work and the time needed for people to engage in further, intrinsically meaningful, wellbeing-enhancing activities. At the heart of this drama is the digital calendar. While often only seen as a useful and quite innocent tool, its functionality and representation subtly enforces certain ways of dealing with time. To counter this, we developed the concept of a benevolent calendar: Perfect Days explicitly cares about the wellbeing-oriented activities of its user. In a study with five quite busy individuals over three weeks, we found that the majority experienced Perfect Days as positive and acknowledged its goal to change time use for the better. After a phase of irritation, participants felt more aware of their personal time use, adopted new wellbeing-enhancing activities, and in part even already internalized these activities.