Our calendars don’t tell the whole story. A meeting at 11 might require some prep time at 10:30; a call at 1:30 could run past 2. And we all know the calendar land grab: A two-hour block of time that appears wide open in the afternoon may actually be needed to focus on a project.

But what if our calendars could allow for some buffer time?

That’s what Kyle Lambert imagined for a prototype concept of an idea he calls the “blast radius,” which adds before and after time to an event that appears as an opaque extension on a calendar item with zigzag lines.

“My initial thought process was, Is there a way in calendars to imply that meetings actually take up more bandwidth than just the allotted time?” Lambert, a staff designer for a website-building platform, tells Fast Company.

There is a financial cost of meetings, but Lambert’s “blast radius” goes a step beyond that notion. It’s an acknowledgment that meetings also have a mental cost that expands beyond the blocked-out time on a calendar. “I lead design for our apps, so I’m doing a lot of deep focus work throughout the day. I talk to a lot of designers who have the same problem,” he says of managers who drop a meeting in the middle of the day because they assume it’s open. “It has a lot more implications on your focus.”

Apple’s Calendar app offers a version of Lambert’s concept by adding travel time to events with a location that notifies users when to leave. It’s part of a larger conversation about how digital calendars can better reflect the way we live and work now.

The new productivity app Amie shows there’s a market for digital calendars built around getting things done, not just blocking out time. Meanwhile, developer Maggie Appleton recently explored the idea of “speculative calendar events”—the unconfirmed plans we make with friends and colleagues that deserve visual distinction on a calendar. Appleton’s rough-sketch solution was to add opacity or a dashed line to speculative events. Think of it as the digital equivalent of writing on a paper calendar with pencil instead of pen.

Lambert says the two groups most excited about his “blast radius” concept have been designers and engineers who want to manage their time better for deep workflows, and managers who need a breather between meetings. He says current calendars aren’t equipped to handle other considerations of modern workplaces, like scheduling for teams across time zones.

“There’s an interesting conversation designers are having,” he says. “What does it mean for calendars to be more helpful?”