A small feature request for calendars

The flow is familiar. A meeting lands in your calendar. You cannot make the proposed time. You use the polite option, which is to propose a new time rather than just declining. The organiser receives the suggestion. So far so good.

The bit that does not work is the gap. While your suggested time is sitting in the organiser's inbox waiting for them to act on it, your calendar treats the proposed slot as if it were freely available. Anyone who has booking permissions on you, or any meeting-finder tool that scans your calendar for free time, can drop something into the slot you have already proposed for the original meeting. The organiser eventually agrees to your suggestion. The original meeting moves to that time. And now you have two meetings in the same slot, one of which you proposed yourself, and the other of which appeared while you were waiting for the organiser to respond.

The fix

When a user proposes a new time, the calendar should hold the proposed slot as tentative on their own calendar until the organiser responds. If the organiser accepts the new time, the tentative becomes a confirmed booking. If the organiser declines or counters, the tentative is released. If the proposal is still outstanding after some reasonable window, perhaps the slot is auto-released and the user is reminded.

None of this is technically interesting. The data is already in the system. The calendar already knows you have proposed a new time, and it already knows the time you proposed. The change is one of policy: treat your own proposal as a soft commitment to yourself. It is more or less a one-line change in the model of what an outstanding proposal means for the proposer.

I have been bitten by the missing version of this feature often enough to write it down. If anyone on the relevant product team reads this, the request is small, the fix is small, and the gratitude from those of us who spend half our weeks rescheduling meetings would be substantial.