Over 100 million people own a personal digital calendar (Outlook, iCal, Google Calendar)... but less than 1% actually use them. Why?

The learning curve with online calendaring - especially compared to other PIM applications - can't be overemphasized enough. I can think of a couple extra reasons: The collision of personal and professional spaces. Granting your managers, co-workers, or executive assistants read/write privileges to your calendar eliminates any motivation for you to use that calendar for personal purposes. Unless, of course, you're on really good terms with your managers, co-workers, or executive assistants. :) Calendar standards. Microsoft Exchange, Yahoo! Calendar and Google Calendar / ICS are all robust, unique platforms, and essentially operate in silos. This complicates two core use-cases: scheduling meetings and finding availability across participants. The iCalendar standard explicitly addresses these issues, but the user experience can still be fragmented. Social invitation services, such as Facebook Events. These services address many underlying needs in the personal space (what's going on, who's going, etc.) with little-to-no user excise/management - especially when complemented with simple email reminders or timely notifications. Facebook Birthdays. As trivial as it sounds: historically, a substantial part of online personal calendaring is simply setting reminders for birthdays. (They're simple, fast, require little ongoing maintenance, and are otherwise easy to forget.) Facebook has basically taken this need and stripped away the management layer. Delayed gratification. Basically, what David and Angel say. It can take a lot of effort, discipline and time to reap the rewards of a well-managed calendar, and people can largely get by using the old familiar methods.

: great reasons. Another way to approach this issue is to look at who does aggressively use calendars. My anecdotal observations: -People with lots of outbound relationships: Real Estate agents, Sales, Business Development, Managers, Lawyers. It has to cost you not to be on time, or to miss out on something important. -People with interpersonal dependencies that are short on time: couples, parents/children -Control-oriented personalities, high performance -I would wager that smartphone users might trend towards more digital calendar usage as they may be navigating more distractions/spaces and may rely on reminders to refocus them on what they need to be doing right then. Calendars are clunky to use, and while they have benefits, most people don't necessarily see the cost/benefit. -It's data entry, and you need to have a certain critical amount of data to see the benefits clearly. You have to feel the pain sharply to realize it's there. -You may also have so many small tasks or fires in your daily routine that scheduling is pointless. These tend to be the paper lists, because they're still faster, and potentially more satisfying from a "crossing things off" perspective -Also for many Calendar-only products, the onboarding is quite clunky. Ever been invited to Tungle? It's like a disfunctional relationship: most people will get by with whatever tools are immediately available: "not great but good enough", "that's just how it is", "mostly ok". You might reason that it's the sort of annoyance that you just have to put up with. You're so busy that you don't have time to investigate better options/learn a new technology. It takes a bit more (maybe a small crisis?) for people to actively seek out a better way of managing their schedule.

A very simple answer - no matter how cool these calendars are, they are empty!!And one has to take the trouble to keep them filled and updated. It was ok in the days of limited number of events and dates to remember like my parents. But not anymore.Our survey told us parents (and youth) follow 13-20 organizations and received constant info about 60-200 events per week via email, social media or visiting websites. Impossible to READ, RETAIN and REMEMBER.We have launched WotNow, a social calendar to address this very common need. With WotNow, you "track" your favorite orgs like schools, clubs, parks, library, church, entertainment, etc and their events automatically get updated in your phone's WotNow app in a calendar form. It is launched for Chicago with 1000s of organizations and we plan to expand nationally soon. Please try http://m.wotnow.me/download and give us some suggestions to make it highly usable and valuable for all.

I think there's a gamut of reasons why people don't use them.  Here is a sampling of reasons I've encountered. I don't know how to use the calendar. I prefer using a paper organizer. It's too difficult to.manage. I don't see the benefits. Takes too much time. Some folks are simply too lazy. Some people are too disorganized. In corporate environments some employees are afraid of management using the calendar to track them. Also in corporate environments, management often fails to require employees to use a calendar.

The premise of the question is wrong. I cannot provide exact numbers due to non-disclosure agreement, but can tell you that the actual number of people actively using electronic calendars is massively higher. One of the major obstacles to wider adoption that we have identified is difficulty in entering new events into the system.

It took me to age 38 to use a paper planner with consistency. What I finally learned after investing in several organizers was that my brain does not play well with the Franklin Covey-like organizing systems. If my brain naturally operated to that level of complexity, why would I need an organizer in the first place? I finally found success in the simple monthly planner with no bells or whistles (although I did manage to get a few phone #'s entered on the address pages in the back). It took several months to make it a habit and I still experienced a few relapses when I forgot to enter something into my planner or forgot to look at my planner to see what was written. I have always been the type of person who desperately needed a personal assistant but did not have one. I have recently had some responsibilities added due to budget cuts that have left us lacking in the assistant department and stumbled onto http://joggleme.com. This has been a Godsend. I'm the type who needs reminders about reminders and this one works with my brain well. To all of you who find calendars and "to do" lists a challenge, I get you. You are not alone. To the rest of you out there who do not understand us, your weakness might be my strength, so bite me. lol

While email address based calendaring works wonderfully in workplace settings, the difficulty with addressing invitees (people have more than one email, which is not the case at workplace, and one is not sure whether invitee has a calendar and most importantly if they sync the calendar to their device, assuming they have a smartphone ). And typing email in a mobile device is as difficult as it gets Check out ZeeCal, http://tiny.cc/ZVideo, Z Calendar solution (uses mobile numbers to identify participants) works with anyone on any device! I bet 100% of contacts have phone numbers but an average person (I mean no techie) has far fewer contacts that also include a (valid) email address!

Google Calendar is the only one I've ever used and if I didn't have a family, I still would not. The best feature is it's online and sometimes I can add an event with the push of a button. But even for Google Calendar I have a wishlist. Feel free to PM me about it.