By the time Outlook was introduced in 1997, the digital calendar had already established a singular identity: it was a place for meetings. A grid of availability. A chessboard of human presence. As Microsoft rolled its email and calendar into one tidy interface, the logic was simple: if you weren’t in a meeting, you were available. 

This worked well when knowledge work moved at the speed of voicemail. But in 2025, it’s a dangerous fiction. Because now, your calendar isn’t just a map of meetings. It’s a minefield of decoys. It’s “focus time” that’s not depicting the real work. It’s blocks labeled “Internal review” that mean “Please don’t book me.” It’s a charade, a game of professional Tetris where the object isn’t to reflect your work, but to avoid being interrupted while doing it. 

The result? Your calendar says you’re always busy.  

From meetings to misinformation 

Digital calendars such as Outlook were designed to coordinate time between people. What they were never built to do was reflect how an individual actually spends their time. There’s no distinction between a client call and deep work, between brainstorming and replying to 87 emails.  

“Everyone’s calendar is full, but no one knows what anyone is doing,” is something we often hear from people who work in teams and managers. This passive resistance to the calendar-as-truth is widespread. Focus time. Strategy blocks. Lunches labeled as calls. It’s not deception; it’s adaptation. Because when the only system you have to show you’re unavailable is the same one people use to book you, you start gaming the system. 

The capacity illusion 

The traditional calendar makes one critical assumption: if you’re not booked, you’re free. This is especially tedious for managers trying to understand their team’s workload. If people are hiding work in “fake” meetings, there’s no way to know who’s slammed or who’s really available. Meetings are visible. Real work is not. 

So managers ask for status updates. They run standups. They build spreadsheets. All to answer one question: What are we doing, and do we have room to do more? 

The answer should be obvious. But most calendars can’t tell you. 

Even more troubling is the bifurcation of where work lives. Your meetings are in your calendar. Your tasks, the actual work, are somewhere else. Maybe in a project management tool. Maybe in a personal to-do list. Maybe in your head. 

This split is so normalized that we rarely question it. But it makes no sense. 

Why should the things you have to do live in a separate universe from the things you have to attend? Why do we treat meetings as first-class citizens and relegate tasks to fragmented systems that no one else can see? 

When your work is scattered across multiple systems, visibility becomes lost. You can’t answer simple questions like, ‘How much time do I really have this week?’ ‘Can I take on this urgent request?’ or ‘Will I hit that deadline?’ But if your tasks and your meetings lived side by side, in the same interface, governed by the same rules of time, you’d finally have a complete picture. 

Visibility is the new availability 

What workers want is visibility. What they currently get is noise. 

Belt replaces the false precision of legacy calendars with a dynamic, truthful picture of work. 

“We realized the calendar was no longer fit for purpose,” says Keith Lipman, CEO of Belt. “It told you where people were supposed to be. But it couldn’t tell you what they were working on.” 

Belt flips the calendar paradigm. Instead of relying on users to manually defend their time with vague meeting blocks, Belt scans for incoming work from email, chat and meeting transcripts, and turns it into scheduled tasks. Real work, with real due dates, scheduled in real time slots. 

“We use AI to interpret the nature of the request,” adds Sheetal Jain, Belt’s CTO. “If an email from your CFO asks for a report by Friday, we don’t just flag it. We identify it as work and help you schedule it. It shows up on your calendar as a Task just like a meeting would.” 

Welcome to the Unified Calendar 

Belt calls this the Unified Calendar. All time is accounted for: scheduled work, incoming requests, ad-hoc calls, and yes, meetings. From this, it generates a real workload indicator. 

“Your calendar shouldn’t just tell people when you’re busy,” says Lipman. “It should help you understand if you can take on more.” 

This shift is subtle but profound. Instead of pretending the calendar is sacred, Belt makes it honest. Instead of treating meetings as the main event, it centers work itself. Instead of forcing teams to guess what each other is doing, it shows them. 

And it does so with a suite of features built for how we work today: 

• Workload indicators: Visual indicators for each day show your bandwidth at a glance.  

• Week tasks: A space for tasks you need to do this week but haven’t yet scheduled for a specific day.  

• Calendar with tasks, meetings, and deadlines: No more double-booking or missed work. Everything lives in one view. 

• Multiple views (Day, 3-Day, Week, Month): View your schedule from your perspective, either day-by-day or in a big-picture view. 

• List or Grid view: Switch perspectives to better plan and process. 

• Filters: Slice by tasks, events, deadlines, or calls.  

• Quick create: Turn ideas into action in one click. Schedule a task, event, or call without leaving the calendar. 

By putting tasks alongside meetings in the same place, Belt creates a holistic view of each person’s actual capacity. When managers can see the full picture, they can balance workloads and prevent burnout before it happens. 

The old calendar was a tool for availability. A box-ticking system of invites and RSVPs. But work has outgrown it. Knowledge workers now operate in a world of constantly changing inputs and shifting priorities. They need a calendar that reflects reality. 

The original digital calendar hasn’t failed; it just stopped keeping up. And that’s where Belt steps in.