You know the way. Does your calendar?
Published 24 September 2026
You create a meeting. You type the title, pick the time, add the people. The location field you leave empty.
You already know where you are going.
So what happens when that field stays blank?
At first, not much. The meeting sits in your calendar and the reminder arrives. But working out how long it takes to get there, finding the address and fitting the trip into the rest of the day are left to you.
At DOFOTT we see an event's location as one of the basic facts that tell you whether a plan can actually work. The room an event takes up in your day can be bigger than its start and end times.
Not every gap in a calendar is time you can use
A meeting ends at two. The next one is at half past. Your calendar shows thirty free minutes.
If both meetings are in the same building, that may be enough. If the second one is forty-five minutes away, two events that never overlap in the calendar are, in real life, impossible to make one after the other.
Most of us run into this often:
- We plan a client visit as one hour, and nothing in the calendar shows that getting there and back takes time too.
- We know the name of the café; as the meeting gets close, we scroll back through messages to find out which branch.
- We save the time of a hospital appointment and forget the walk from the car park to the right department.
- We send the invitation without an address, and every guest who doesn't know the place asks for it separately.
Filling in the address doesn't fix all of these on its own. But it keeps what you need to plan the trip and the meeting right beside the event.
Research shows why a concrete plan matters
In a randomised field experiment with 3,272 employees, published in 2011, everyone was sent a notice giving the places and times of the flu vaccination clinics at work. Some were also asked to write down the date and time they would go.
In the group asked to pick a date and time, the vaccination rate was 4.2 percentage points higher than in the control group, whose rate was 33.1%. Adding one small planning step to information people already had made a measurable difference to what they did. (Milkman et al., 2011)
There is a wider body of research too. A meta-analysis by Sheeran, Listrom and Gollwitzer, published online in 2024, brought together 642 independent tests. It found that plans tying a specific situation to an action help across different areas, behaviour included. The effects varied with the form of the plan and the conditions it was used in, and were larger for plans of the form "When this happens, I will do that." (Sheeran, Listrom and Gollwitzer, 2024)
It is worth being exact about where these studies stop. None of them measures how much filling in a calendar's location field reduces lateness. In the first experiment, every group had already been given the location. What the research supports is this: completing an intention with details you can act on can make it easier to act.
The lesson we take from it for calendars is the same. When you write down a plan, it is worth writing down what you need to carry it out.
Knowing the time is not enough; you need to know when to leave
A location also does something concrete in software. Apple Calendar, for example, can tell you when it is time to leave: when the event's location is one Maps recognises and the right permissions are on, it uses where you start and the traffic or public transport conditions. It depends on the app you use and its settings. (Apple Calendar help)
Being reminded of a three o'clock meeting at ten to three may not be enough if the trip takes forty minutes. So knowing when to leave matters as much as knowing when the event starts.
Next time you create an in-person event, choose the right location, add the branch or the entrance if it helps, and set aside time in your calendar for the trip. Then you won't have to put the address, the route and the timing back together at the last minute.
At DOFOTT we believe a good plan has to take the real conditions of the day into account. Location is one of them.
You may know the way. Put how much of your day it takes into your calendar too.