EC just offhandedly asked me what I was going to be doing after work and if I'd be intersted in joining her in a number of activities. One of them is a talk about Climate Change at the Longnow Foundation. Which I had completely meant to go to and completely forgotten about. Ruchira sent me the description by email--mathematical physics, visualization, and climate change. What's for a Saheli not to love? But at the moment that I got the email I was too busy to go through the trouble of transcribing all the details to my Gmail calendar, especially since I really wasn't sure I'd actually be going. The same thing happens with my Entourage system for work all the time. I'll get a note about a potentially interesting event, but I'm not sure I want to go, so it doesn't seem worth the effort to transcribe all the details to my Entourage calendar, and then I forget about it.

It's a silly little effort barrier, because these details all follow a standard format--what, when, where, how much. Google Calendar is even smart enough about this format that it prompts you to enter in an event in natural language and then pretty reliably parses that into its own format.

So what I want is a button on any incoming email that says, "Is this an event?" And when I hit it, the combined email/calendaring system attempts to interpret what the events in the email are and presents me with its interpretation. I can then confirm/correct the interpretation and add it to my calendar--two click scheduling.