[nogabebop23]

We work in resource scheduling and this is a continual tension between "algo optimized" and "manually tweaked". We have lots of very smart people working on both the technology and the workflows, but none of them have ever been able to explain to me how you resolve this in a consistent, universal way. I see the same problem here.

[user5994461]

If you're expected to gather many people (more than 10), or really need to work with few specific people on a specific project. One trick is to schedule a weekly or biweekly meeting for that.

If you really need it one specific week, send an update with topics that must be covered. If you really don't need it one week, cancel it in advance.

Assuming that you work with regular people or on regular projects. You or other participants will always have something to share, but maybe only 15 minutes out of the hour, it's fine.

Edit: this makes me realize. It's obviously not a software algorithm for scheduling, because this ain't a technological problem. So to make it a technological problem, the issue might be to identify groups of people who interact and prepare them regular timeslots together. Now that's a plan for a SV startup that will disrupt how meetings happen.

[zerzar]

Optimizing scheduling in a system that is already at or over capacity (i.e. double bookings) is a very challenging problem and we don't claim to solve that problem. It would require manual user input which doesn't work very well. Instead, we focus on solving rearranging meetings based on urgency and also to optimize for individual focus time