I’m not sure about everyone else but I find that scheduling meetings with people can be a tiresome and time-consuming process. Working out who is free when, especially if there is more than one person needed and then when you eventually get everything lined up you realise that you’ve now got back-to-back meetings with no time in between to plan (or get a drink or a sandwich).
This came into sharp focus for me during the lock-down period of the pandemic when I was working on a procurement exercise for one of my clients.
When undertaking a large value procurement there are two lots of meetings that often need arranging, the first would be a site(s) visit where in the old world you would get all potential bidders onto site on the same day to have a look around and ask questions and then after the close of the exercise a series of meetings to give feedback to bidders.
During the period in question though site visits weren’t a thing so I was faced with setting up 10 Teams sessions to take care of the site visit/bidder presentations and then a further set of 8 meetings at the end to give the feedback to those not sucessful (one dropped out in case you think I’m just bad at maths).
Now, none of the bidders had a single person dealing with the project and so each meeting required not just organising availability of two people but many people and in some cases they were using sub-contractors so several people across multiple organisations.
This was not a happy prospect. Then I had the thought, it can’t just be me who finds this a pain so perhaps someone has created a solution to the problem.
That is when I discovered Calendly.
Calendly is a product that allows you to create self-service calendar slots which you can then offer to people wanting to meet with you to pick the one that best fits their needs.
It is a hugely flexible product and has a lot to offer. I was so struck by it that I immediately took out a subscription for the standard tier product as I knew that I would end up spending more in my time cost on just this one project.
The first thing to do when getting to grips with Calendly is to link it to the calenders you want to use.
As you can see, it supports a wide range of calendars, both cloud and on-premise products such as Microsoft Exchange. In the tier I am using you can connect up to 6 calendars. This section also lets you decide which accounts are to be checked for free/busy times and which are to be used to insert meetings.
Once connected and authorised Calendly can be used to set up a range of what they describe as events. Events can take a number of different forms and some are dependent on the tier of the product that you have but with just the One-on-One and Group event types I was able to do what I needed. I have subsequently found the meeting poll event a useful tool.
There are two primary modes of operation. The first is creating events which are visible to everyone via your Calendly Landing Page.
This is used a lot in sales environments where they want to give people an opportunity to schedule a session entirely without input from the calendar owner. For me though this wasn’t very desirable, I had no wish to allow random people to schedule meetings with me and fortunately, you can make events private so that only people with the link can make a selection.
One of the great features is the ability to turn events on and off which means you can set up events ahead of time and then only make them live when you want people to book. You can also create events as templates to save time later and can clone any current event.
So, lets take a look at setting up an event and some of the options available to you by creating a One-to-one event.
The first thing to do is give the meeting a name. This can be anything but is what your meeting guest will see so make it something meaningful. At this stage also note that the event defaults to Off which means it won’t be visible until you change that.
The next step is to determine the location of the meeting which in reality is more the type of meeting.
As you can see, Calendly supports a wide range of options. The full list is:
- In Person
- Phone Call
- Google Meet
- Zoom
- Microsoft Teams
- WebEx
- GoTo Meeting
- Custom
- Ask Invitee
The last of those is interesting and helps in the unlikely event that the invitee doesn’t support any of the major platforms. If you select one of the online options then when the invitee chooses a slot, Calendly will automatically create the appropriate meeting type complete with online links. In my case it is usually Teams.
The description is what appears on the event for the invitee to understand which meeting they are booking in for. The Event link will automate to a hyphenated version of the Event name field but you can change it if you want a more descriptive link. It is this that you will send to the invitee.
Event colour may seem a bit of a gimmick but if like me you are working on multiple projects with multiple clients it can be a good way to differentiate between meetings, for example, it would not be unusual for me to have more than one feedback booking event live at the same time.
Clicking next takes you to the “When can people book…” section and this is where the real power starts to take shape. With this in mind, although this is all one section I’ll break it down into more discrete options.
The first is how far in advance would you like people to be able to book. For the use case I’ve outlined the date range has always been the most appropriate but if you were, for example, using this to allow your team members to book in 1-1 slots it would make sense to offer it either fixed to a number of days ahead or indeed indefinitely to allow them to book multiple 1-1 slots into the future. The date range is totally flexible and could be a single day or a much longer period and when we get to the hours available below you can see how combining features on this page starts to get really powerful.
Before continuing, although this is a One-to-one event it doesn’t mean that you have to use it with only one person. You can set it up and send the link to multiple people who then get to choose on a first-come, first-served basis and this is how I’ve used it most.
The next step is to say how long. The drop-down has 15-minute increments up to one hour but there is also a custom option which allows you to schedule events up to 12 hours, although that is not a meeting I would want to attend!
The next stage is to say what days you are available and this works with the dates you selected above. By default, it will go to the standard working hours schedule which can be defined in the Availability section.
For this meeting we are going to put in some custom hours as per the image above but it is also possible to define multiple schedules ahead of time, for example the one to one hours could be created as a separate schedule to allow it to be used for more than one event type.
The custom hours approach does however give the widest amount of options for days and hours. Clicking the + sign on a given day allows you to select multiple slots so you could for example limit the options on Monday to 9am-11am and then again 2pm-4pm.
By default Calendly will block out existing appointments in your linked calendars, for example if you are on leave it will not allow scheduling as long as that has been blocked out in the calendar. However it may be that there is a placeholder or some other event in the calendar that you are happy to override and this can be done using the override options here. When linking your calendar it will by default, in the case of Office 365, include Tentative entries so this would be a way to override those without altering the global setting.
Again, it is possible to select multiple time slots per day. Just to reiterate, this is overriding time in your linked calendars that are marked unavailable so that people can still book time that otherwise would be blocked out.
The next feature is really helpful. It allows you to define a buffer before and after events. This prevents back-to-back meeting syndrome while still allowing you to offer a flexible set of slots. For example, if you have set aside a full day to have meetings in 30 minute slots, as soon as the first person books a slot it will automatically remove the option to book within the buffer time. This does obviously however reduce the number of slots available so it is worth double checking you still have enough time assigned for all the meetings you need.
Clicking on the Additional rules….link takes you to some even more powerful options. I won’t cover them all here but a couple of really helpful ones are the ability to limit how far ahead of the event someone can book. By default, this is 4 hours so you will always get that much notice ahead of the meeting to allow for preparation. You could for example make this 1 day so that meetings have to have at least 24 hours notice.
You can also limit the number of events per day so in our one-to-one example it may be that you only want to do a maximum of say 3 a day.
Last but very much not least the ability to make the event secret. Selecting this option means that the meeting doesn’t show up on the default page and is only available to those that the link has been sent to. This is how I’ve set up 100% of my events so far.
There are a number of other categories with a host of options but for now we will consider our event ready for action. All we need to do is send the link to anyone that we want to be able to book a slot.
As you can see, the person responding gets the chance to choose from the range of slots across the Monday and Friday slots.
Now all the person booking has to do is add their name and the email address that they want the invite to be sent to and click schedule. There is an option to add notes to help prepare for the meeting if needed.
This will create a standard meeting in the calendar, in this case as I am using Outlook, Office 365 and Teams (on both the host diary and the account I used to create a slot) it creates a standard Teams meeting entry with the addition of some tools to help me manage the event within Calendly if needed.
From the organiser’s point of view, it is the same story, a standard calendar entry for the meeting with all the Teams information automatically sorted out.
And that’s it. I have just scraped the surface here of what Calendly can offer but I have found it incredibly useful and a real time saver. Although there is a cost per licence it wouldn’t take many events before the cost of manually organising complex meetings is over the licence cost.
