Calendar Management Tips

Minimizing Ping-pong-ing Scheduling Emails

Every minute spent sending scheduling emails is just wasted life force. This waterfall of scheduling has worked for me to keep all that to a minimum.

• If it’s only one person (or a couple people from one organization) scheduling with you, ask them to use a self-scheduler like Calendyly or zCal.

• If it’s a few people:

• Send 3 holds from your calendar named “Hold 1 of 3: name of meeting”, “Hold 2 of 3…” and so forth

• Ask everyone to accept all the holds that work and decline any holds that don’t work for them.

• When all (or enough folks to tell) have responded, pick one, change the title to “Confirmed: blah blah”

• Delete/cancel the holds that you now don’t need.

Self-Service Scheduling

• Enable self-service scheduling, in Hubspot or Reclaim for external folks and in Google Calendar for internal folks.

• Allow your personal calendar and your work calendar to co-exist nicely in, for example, your phone app

Setting up a scheduling page is great for getting external folks to self-schedule, but if you’ve got both a work calendar and a personal calendar, you’ll need something to keep them in synch so that these self-schedule pages will account for holds on both.

Although you can create or subscribe to a bunch of calendars in gCal, Google uses only your default calendar for free-busy info. So, to have a calendar that isn’t your default one hold time on the your default calendar, you have to synch them somehow. There is no google tool to do this, so we’ll do it in Reclaim.ai

Set up an account on Reclaim.ai and follow their instructions to copy your personal events to your work calendar.

Join Relevant Public Calendars

Ask someone to share public calendars with you, and add them to your account in Google Calendar.