4 Facts About Shared Calendars that Will Change the Way You Schedule Appointments
Calendars rule our lives: they tell us where we need to be when. That’s useful, at least in keeping track of our days, but when we share calendars with other people, problems creep in. There are some simple facts about shared calendars that most of us choose to ignore, but by taking them into account, we can make our schedules more manageable.
- Very few people block out time to work on their shared calendar. That makes it easy for other people to fill up your entire day, not leaving any time to get actual work done. If you want to give people the ability to schedule your time for you, you have to lay the ground rules, including blocking off certain times to work on a regular basis.
- Not everything makes it on to a calendar, shared or otherwise. The simple truth is that software-based calendars work with the information we give them, and we don’t always get everything in place. From appointments that we feel we shouldn’t share with our coworkers (such as doctor’s appointments) to time limitations that we assume people understand (like the fact most of us want to actually go home at some point in the day), there are many things that aren’t on your calendar.
- Calendar software defaults control our schedules. Most of us schedule meetings or events in hour-long increments, or occasionally half-hour increments. That’s because those are the time increments that most calendars default to. If you reset the defaults to something shorter, like 15 minutes, you’ll wind up with at least a few shorter meetings and some more breathing room in your schedule.
- Shared calendars don’t really show how much time is being used. If, for instance, someone schedules an hour-long meeting, it’s easy enough to say that meeting only takes up an hour. The truth, though, is that meeting takes up as many hours as people who attend it. Everyone spends an hour — an hour that the organization pays for and that could be spent doing other things — if they attend a group meeting. That isn’t necessarily a problem if the meeting is valuable, but the actual time commitment doesn’t show up on a calendar.
How do you use shared calendars in your organization? Do you experience any problems like these?
Image by Flickr user Joe Lanman
