As processes around hybrid work, spatially distant collaborations, and work-life boundaries grow increasingly complex, managing workers' schedules for synchronous meetings has become a critical aspect of building successful global teams. However, gaps remain in our understanding of workers' scheduling preferences and practices, which we aim to fill in this large-scale, mixed-methods study of individuals calendars in a multinational organization. Using interviews with eight participants, survey data from 165 respondents, and telemetry data from millions of meetings scheduled by 211 thousand workers, we characterize scheduling preferences, practices, and their relationship with each other and organizational factors. We find that temporal preferences can be broadly classified as either cyclical, such as suitability of certain days, or relational, such as dispersed meetings, at various time scales. Furthermore, our results suggest that these preferences are disconnected from actual practice--albeit with several notable exceptions--and that individual differences are associated with factors like meeting load, time-zones, importance of meetings to job function, and job titles. We discuss key themes for our findings, along with the implications for calendar and scheduling systems and socio-technical systems more broadly.

翻译：随着混合办公、空间分散协作以及工作与生活界限日益复杂，管理工作者用于同步会议的日程已成为构建成功全球团队的关键环节。然而，我们对工作者调度偏好与实践的理解仍存在空白——本研究旨在通过一项针对跨国组织个体日历的大规模混合方法研究填补这一缺口。我们采用对8名参与者的访谈、165名受访者的调查数据，以及21.1万名工作者排定的数百万会议遥测数据，系统刻画了调度偏好、实践及其相互关联性，并剖析了组织因素的影响。研究发现：时间偏好可大致分为周期性偏好（如特定日期的适宜性）和关联性偏好（如分散会议安排），且这些偏好存在于不同时间尺度上。此外，我们的结果表明——尽管存在若干显著例外——这些偏好与实际实践存在脱节，且个体差异与会议负载、时区、会议对工作职能的重要性及职位头衔等因素相关。我们讨论了研究结果的关键主题，及其对日历与日程系统乃至更广泛的社会技术系统的启示。