About eezySchedule

How did eezySchedule come to be?

It was 06:00 on a winter's morning. I was wrapped up in a sleeping bag in a tent on a camping trip with my family, and it was still dark outside. Unfortunately, the lights were already on in my head. I was thinking — again — about a financial process issue back at work. "Oh my word, why am I thinking about work now?"

By the third morning, with the same scene playing out in my mind, I realised I needed to do something — not about the financial process, which could genuinely wait, but about why my brain was replaying this on auto-repeat.

I remembered a book I'd come across about managing projects and next actions, which led me to David Allen and his rather wonderful "Getting Things Done" methodology. When I got back to the office, I bought the audiobook and listened to it twice, back to back, on my drives to and from work over the next couple of weeks. Somewhere in those hours behind the wheel, I realised I'd found the answer. I just needed to put it into practice.

What I took from it was more than simply a better way of keeping track of things. I began to see that whenever something was repeatedly using up mental bandwidth, the answer was often to stop carrying it around in my head and instead work out what needed to happen next. Clarify the problem, look for possible solutions, evaluate them, implement the one that made the most sense, and then — wherever possible — put the resulting process on autopilot. That became something of an operating philosophy for me: solve the underlying problem properly, get it out of the way, and free up the mental space to focus on the things that really need my attention.

That philosophy proved useful in my working life. Part of my job involved coordinating teams and arranging meetings and appointments, often with people spread across different organisations. Like most people working in a knowledge-based environment, everyone already had plenty competing for their attention, so scheduling activities could become surprisingly time-consuming. I found myself looking for a simple way to take some of that friction out of the process — something that would let people coordinate their availability or book meetings without creating yet another administrative task to manage.

I looked for a software tool, but nothing really stuck as the solution I was looking for. I wanted something straightforward and easy to use, without unnecessary clutter, but I also wanted it to have enough depth and flexibility to handle the situations that inevitably arise in real-world scheduling. When I couldn't find quite what I was looking for, I eventually reached the conclusion that perhaps the simplest answer was to build something myself.

And I can still remember when the idea first really crystallised. It was a Saturday morning, just after dawn, having finally crested the top of one of the longest and steepest mountain-bike climbs I used to ride near my home. Perhaps it was the combination of fresh air, exercise and a mind that had finally stopped thinking about everything else, but somewhere up there the idea for a straightforward scheduling app came together. Inspiration can arrive at some pretty unexpected times.

The following week I picked up Eric Ries' The Lean Startup for some inspiration, wrote down what I thought the core features of eezySchedule should be, and started building. I had developed several software systems in my own time over the years to solve problems for the teams I worked with, so I already knew how satisfying it could be to turn a recurring frustration into something that simply made the problem go away. This time, though, I wanted to take that idea a little further and build something that other people could use too.

eezySchedule is the result of that process. I set out to build a scheduling tool that was straightforward to use, but without sacrificing the capabilities needed to handle real-world scheduling. From the outset, I wanted the first tier — the Essential plan — to provide everything needed to achieve a complete scheduling outcome, rather than feel like a limited version of the product. And for those who want more control, convenience and flexibility, the Complete plan adds the advanced features. In many ways, that brings me back to where this story started: identify the problem, find a good solution, put it on autopilot, and move on to the things that need your attention.

However you arrived here today, I trust you'll find eezySchedule a valuable tool for simplifying your workplace scheduling challenges. I hope it helps put one more thing on autopilot, so you can get on with the things that really need your attention.

Go well,
Jeremy Wallis,
Founder, eezySchedule.