Has there ever been a time when you needed to collaborate with coworkers, clients, or vendors, and it became a momentous task to schedule a time that works on everyone’s calendar? With the holidays in full swing, it can become stressful to get jobs done when it requires meetings with others who may be on vacation, not to mention all the other roadblocks that can come up when scheduling time. Thankfully there are tools available that can be used to make the headache of calendar management a thing of the past.
Here are five tips to help manage your calendar and make meeting scheduling smoother:
- Use natural language to find meeting times – When scheduling a meeting in Outlook, you may not have an easily findable date. For example, you may need to create a follow-up meeting about six weeks from now. Instead of manually clicking through your calendar counting each week, Outlook will recognize terms like “in six weeks” in the meeting date. Outlook will then populate with a date six weeks from that day.
- Create meetings via email replies – This is Outlook’s most straightforward but often overlooked feature. There are times when after a few email correspondences, a meeting needs to be created. This can be done by opening the message options and selecting meeting reply. Doing this makes creating a meeting more straightforward and keeps all past emails in the meeting invite.
- Recreate meetings with fewer steps – Another simple but highly effective tool from Outlook. Say you just had a meeting, and the participants decide another meeting is needed the next day. Instead of creating a new meeting from scratch, hold the control button and drag the original meeting invite to the new time, creating a copy of that meeting. You will still need to add the attendees to the newly created meeting, but this will save time as everything else has remained the same.
- Show multiple time zones – At Communiqué, we have employees and clients working in different time zones, making scheduling time tricky. When looking at your calendar, go to the left-hand side of the screen that shows times and right-click on it to see options, then click on “Change Time Zone.” This will bring up a window where you can add up to two other time zones on the left side of your calendar. This is not only helpful for scheduling but also helps in keeping any correspondence within the other person’s working hours by having your calendar show their current time.
- Embrace calendar management programs – Many free and paid applications are available that make calendar management a breeze. Clockwise and FindTime are just two applications that can collaborate with your work calendar to give you more scheduling options. FindTime will send scheduling options to your meeting participants, and each person can mark the times that work best for them, giving you clear insight. This eliminates the need for back-and-forth messaging and gets the meeting on your calendar with better efficiency.
With these tips, creating meetings and managing your calendar won’t be a chore. Much of the information in this blog comes from the work of Kevin Stratvert. His YouTube channel has various other technology-related videos that are informative and easy to follow.