Everyone has played this email tennis game right? The endless meeting invites, tentative or decline replies, repeat.

The title of an article I read recently sums it up nicely ” Scheduling meetings burns productivity”! (the article is linked further down this post)

There are plenty of tools to help with this, some like Outlook’s scheduling assistant have been around for ages (though it amazes me how many people still don’t use this or maybe choose not to!)

This post though is to highlight a couple of tools that may be useful in this area.

The first I came across in this post the other day that has a slightly different approach to scheduling time, the product it talks about is called GoodTime. The article here, is an interview with its co-founder. But if you want to know more about the product, go to their website goodtime.io

Essentially it looks at scheduling in multiple different ways, but using one interface. It integrates with the main calendaring platforms and video conferencing platforms.

The second is useful if you’re a Microsoft 365 house, as there are some tools within that platform that can help, though I find they’re maybe not as neatly joined together (yet). So meet now in Teams or see availability through Outlook for example. But one you might not have come across is FindTime, this is an Outlook add-in (modern) and it essentially shortcuts the “tennis” by bundling options into one poll.

On receipt if you click on the options you get taken to a Microsoft webpage to enable you to pick your options.

The organiser then receives a notification email that shows a collated view of all the responses, where they can see which is the best slot and schedule the meeting with one click. They also have access to a FindTime dashboard where they can see all the “polls” in one place too.

There’s a good article here that shows the whole process.

Now a request, I am sure in the past I have seen something like FindTime being available as a portal, so a web page you can go to to schedule a meeting with someone and it gave a view of the slots available for that person based on their calendar. I was sure it was part of the 365 ecosystem. If you know what this might be please let me know in the comments, as I couldn’t find anything through Google.