While comprehensive email and calendar clients like Outlook also allow employees to find common meeting times, many times the people I need to meet with use different email clients and we work for different agencies. I abhor the back and forth emails trying to find a common time that look like this...
- Me: I can do either the 24th from 10am-11am or anytime during the afternoon of the 23, 25, 26th. What's good for you?
- You: 10:30am-11:30am on the 24th might work for me but I'll have to check a previous commitment. The 23 and 25th are out. Can you do noon on the 26th?
- Me: I forgot to include Danielle on this email and I'm not sure what her availability is. Can you check with her?
- You: Sure, I'll check with her. What about Jeremy? Should we include him? I think so but he's out of town that week so we may need to find other dates times.
So, Doodle to the rescue!
If you are initiating a meeting then you start by logging into your account. From there you name the meeting and select potential dates and times. You can invite your meeting participants by inputting their email addresses directly in Doodle or you can have Doodle generate a link to drop into an email. I prefer the latter but if you have many consistent meetings with the same people, inputting their emails directly into Doodle may make more sense.
As the meeting initiator you can set Doodle to inform you each time someone responds and keep track of the most popular common time. Once everyone has had time to respond, you can let them know the date and time through Doodle if you've inputted their email addresses or via a separate email.
Simple. Easy. Effective. Doodle.
