I've been lucky enough to be in the beta and absolutely love this calendar app. There are a lot out there today, but there's something about MayDay that seems to just work better. Tags are great for organising and I use the shield function a lot, especially for writing times.
Love your enthusiasm Giles! Thanks for being such an engaged beta tester and vocal supporter of what we're building – we really appreciate it. Looking forward to seeing what you think about where we go next. 🙌
Thanks Boris! Lots more to come in the next few releases that will only further improve the way we optimize your schedule! Really appreciate your support.
Designed for people with multiple calendars ... I've been looking for something that solves this problem in a new way. The only downside is that they are still working on connecting to Apple and Outlook calendars.
Thanks for your review @lance_cummings1! And thanks for being a part of our early access beta – you have quite the multiple calendar situation going on, so I'm glad Mayday has been able help with that! Outlook is coming soon – you'll be one of the first to know. 🙌
Mayday is pretty awesome. It has been a part of my daily workflow for a while. It started as a replacement for Sunrise, and it has evolved to something way more useful. Calendar Shield is surprisingly subtle and helpful -- it makes sure that my calendar is never jammed to the point of disaster. It just keeps my 4 work calendars, family and personal calendars working together for me. Being able to "sync" an event across all of the calendars has been a life saver. Thanks @jeremybell and the Mayday team, you make my life better.
I've had a great overall experience with Mayday, although I do believe it could use a bit more polish here and there (dragging calendar events feels a bit clunky, notifications can't be assigned on a per-event basis, I couldn't find any Search feature, and the NLP feature is being reworked). I'd say there are four aspects of Mayday that made me decide to switch to it:
1. Smart Tags: The way that I time block is by creating different types of events, each with their own properties. I can technically implement this planning system using any calendar app, but Mayday pairs much better with this system because of this feature. One such time block type is the "Hours" type that I use to indicate the hours a store I need to run an errand at is open. Since this time block doesn't represent time I'm busy, I'd like my calendar app to consider this time as "Free." With Smart Tags, I can automatically allow any event with the "Hours" tag to be considered "Free."
2. FYI Events: Continuing my first example with the "Hours" event type, I don't really need to see an "Hours" event because these events are more so for my task manager in Airtable — which has a Google Calendar integration — then for my calendar. In situations like this one, I can mark such events as "FYI Events," so they don't clutter my calendar. Additionally, I have the option to have this property automatically assigned to events depending on their tag using the aforementioned Smart Tags feature.
3. Scheduling Links: I recently became a team lead for the first time, so I've found myself having to coordinate schedules with people more often as of late. Mayday's Scheduling Links have been a great way to streamline this process, so that finding a mutually available time to meet can be accomplished in one interaction instead of several.
4. Swift UI: I love it when developers are willing to put in the extra work required to develop an app natively instead of relying on development shortcuts, such as Electron. I find that such apps tend to feel more at home on their respective platforms, which leads to a nicer user experience. For instance, Mayday, despite being a fairly young app, has both a nice Menu Bar app and widgets.
If you're looking for a simple, yet elevated calendar experience and have the willingness to wait for some of the aforementioned quirks to be resolved, then I recommend giving Mayday a shot.
Thank you for the thorough and thoughtful review @tacit_transistor! It is so helpful to share your use cases and makes your feedback much more actionable. Thanks for sharing and for your 'willingness to wait' on the NLP update, search and our ongoing mission to make Mayday as fast and performant as it can be. 🙌
Do you ever imagine what you could do by reclaiming 5-10 hours of high-quality, productive time every week?
Or how it would feel if you could save yourself the time and pain of back and forth scheduling and repetitive data entry?
I’ve been using Mayday for almost 2 years now and couldn’t imagine life without it.
Why I love Mayday:
1. Let’s me protect my time, which is my most valuable asset, before someone else steals it. The thing that most of us are completely unaware of is how much of our time and focus is “stolen” by that which we have been conditioned to think is normal - people booking meetings directly into your calendar, emails and messaging apps demanding your attention based on the sender’s schedule, not yours, etc
2. Optimizes what times I make available to others for meetings based on what works best for me - Mayday learns from my inputs and usage to determine ideal times for meetings, focus work, etc. It’s helped me to re-engineer my working schedule so I’m more productive yet also more calm and relaxed.
3. Automates repetitive elements of scheduling to save me 50% of the time I would normally spend on sending out invites - directions, instructions, durations, etc.
There’s so much more to what Mayday enables and I’m thrilled that they’ve now opened up this release to the public
Love this review, Zaheer! Thank you for your support and sharing these very relatable and everyday use cases – hopefully we can help many more people take control of their time with Mayday. 🙌