I always just say, "Does Tuesday at 3:00 work for you?" even if I know I'm booked then. Rescheduling is easier.
As someone with many meetings who often has to coordinate with people with even more meetings, who the hell thinks like this? It's "get in line" because otherwise every revision requires changing someone else's calendar which requires changing someone else's etc. How is it not self-evident that it's easier to just find a currently mutually available time, and that if we're not in the same organization a simple way to do that is for one person to tell the other when they're available?
The whole thing seems deeply dystopian to me. I'm busy but almost never have more than four meetings in a week.
I start every morning with a bowl of oatmeal with dried fruit plus a pot of coffee. Any meeting between like 9 and 11 is contingent.
Obviously, for people in my organization, they can see that on my calendar as "Focus Time."
I don't understand. Who am I supposed to hate?
You're supposed to hate people who talk about apps you don't know anything about. I am enraged every time someone mentions "Instagram."
And their scheduling apps are just noise.
Twitter is the go-to place for finding people to hate.
I am assuming that Calendly performs the function of an Outlook meeting invite. If so, it's a pretty great thing.
Am I missing something? Are you obligated to accept a Calendly invitation or something? (Outlook even lets you respond. You can not only turn down the meeting, but that program lets you say, "Fuck off. Go away." too.
I think this guy mostly wishes he had a secretary who did his scheduling for him, and could do that old power move where they make the phone call and have the other person wait for him to get on the line.
Within a workplace, people who know each other's work (sometimes executive assistants) can sometimes do more holistic assessments of schedules and relative urgencies so that it's better thought out than just finding the next free slot, as he suggests. But between people with different employers, I'm not sure that function has ever really been performed, except by a person saying "no, it has to be sooner than that" and being accommodated or not.
I definitely don't want to find a time to meet with this guy.
I work with many people who are very tightly scheduled and I've always thought it must be really tiring. I guess the money is worth it. I've never had the chance to have to choose.
I started using Calendly for office hours appointments back when everything first went remote, and it's been so helpful.
I had 13 meetings on my calendars this week (work plus personal, I'd say eight is more typical, three of them for the kid) and I still wouldn't want to use something like this program because of all the stuff not on that. Taking the kid to and from school isn't on my calendar but it would be a pain to not be able to do so, for starters. I don't put most deadlines on my calendar but if someone asks for a meeting right before the deadline for something else, either I'm in trouble or they are. etc.
My boss when I first started my current job had an elaborate system of color-coding for her Outlook calendar to indicate which things could be moved and how easily. That seems like a good idea for highly scheduled people, but very labor-intensive. She got fired a couple months after I started, but not because of her calendar system AFAIK.
My boss even I first started working at after graduate school was seriously old school. She kept a physical file system with copies of all correspondence indexed by day. Email was printed and filed.
18: For my office hours, I only let students make appointments during the blocks I reserve for that purpose (and it also syncs with my Google Calendar so I know whether I have an appointment scheduled). I don't keep track of anything else with Calendly; it's really just a sign-up tool for me.
28 meetings this week. Fairly average week.
Outlook used to persist in sending me weekly messages remarking on how good I was keeping so much of my calendar free from meetings. I couldn't tell if was sarcasm or not.
I had never heard of Calendly before this, so I assume that the post is an ingenious bit of stealth marketing for the app. "I, a Raging Asshole, Will Never Use Your Convenient Scheduling App."
I have just had a pathetic note from someone I do some work for saying that only one person turned up for her weekly zoom planning meeting, and "we need to rethink". (I skipped it too, but did send an excuse). Tempted to reply "This is because we are all busy people and we have learned that few of your ideas result in any -- even potential -- financial benefit, and I personally am bored of finding tactful ways to say that 'This would be a bad idea even for the BBC Sunday programme and you are not trying to compete with them'."
Seriously, dealing with ex-BBC people does make me understand how anyone might want to abolish it. OTOH, making Radio 4 programmes was one of the most professionally rewarding experiences of my life. Perhaps there's a sorting mechanism involved in making people "ex-". I think there was until quite recently, but now a lot of really good people have gone freelance.
Calendly is just....ok? honestly I don't see the need for a bunch of NYT Styles wanking?
(somehow depressing that despite all our mockery the distinctive style and tone of that thing took over all media globally)
re: 25
I have a friend who works for the BBC who bemoans the fact that he has to run programs with a bunch of freelancers who know nothing about the program or it's audience, or even how to do the basic technical things required to get the program out, and that all of the good people are being made redundant because they are expensive. He has been acting up multiple levels above his pay grade for years, and is still waiting to hear whether he'll be permanently regraded from the level he is on up one level, to the level 2 levels below the job he actually does.
Meetings are a constant problem for me.
A part of my "real" job involves meetings. There's no way around it, and I'm not one of those people who is opposed to meetings out of some strange principle that only pointed-haired empty-headed management types get any value out of them.
But, I often have some many meetings scheduled in that I have no time to do the work needed to be productive in the meeting in the first place.
Facilitator / agile ceremonies person: "We are meeting to discuss the plans for project X".
Me: "Aye, all very well, but I'm in charge of project X, and I've had one free hour not in meetings since Monday, so ... there IS no fucking plan for project X."
We don't even have agile ceremonies. Or lumbering ones.
When I started at my current job, I was a temp covering someone's maternity leave for twins (4 months, so a 6 month gig) I expected the admin of the director to just send me a calendar link. Once I was working there permanently, on the couple of occasions the Senior Director wanted me to meet with her, she e-mailed me to ask me to contact her admin who was a kind soul.
But I found it obnoxious when the person whose position I was covering referred to me as "her temp". All of my colleagues who shared the same title as I did would always ask about something and ask if a time worked. The person I was covering for would send outlook invitations with no explanation. I thought it was kind of obnoxious, since she was teaching me what I needed to do her job but not supervising me.
Of course, I felt insecure, because it was a temporary job, and I wanted to find something permanent, and because I felt insecure, the way she used Outlook felt really aggressive.
That was the nice thing about GroupWise. No aggression.
28: I imagine you've tried the track of reserving a couple hours a day, so anyone with access to your calendar availability thinks you have a meeting then?
re: 33
Sometimes. However, that often just ends up in the MD saying, "I saw you had _thing_ at 11am, but I guessed it wasn't that important, so I invited you to this thing with _client_."
I should definitely use that tactic more often, though.
Why is there explicitly a person in the negotiation at all? When we agree to meet, shouldn't our schedules consult each other and report back to each of us privately "with your current public preferences your first possible mutual meeting is at $D"? Plus then we cautiously weaken constraints and re-bid?
Still a power move to postpone re-bidding as long as possible to see who changes their preferences first. Maybe some meetings won't happen. Oh no!
There's a lot of work in creating a schedule that detailed.
But people who schedule meetings *have* detailed schedules, yeah? Maybe now they have to explicitly tell their calendar when they start and end work (Calendly must have an estimate of that, actually, if it handles meetings between time zones.)