-
About Me
- Co-founded BuzzStream to streamline blogger outreach and link building.
- Co-founded a top 5 apartment hunting site that was acquired by Internet Brands
- MBA from the McCombs School of Business
- Mentor with Capital Factory
- Exploring new ventures, and taking SEO projects
Scheduling Assistant Gadget for Google Calendar
Install ‘When I’m Free’ Google Calendar Gadget
Background
I use Google Calendar and schedule appointments all the time with people who are outside my company and don’t use Google Calendar, so we can’t see each other’s calendars. That means I spend a lot of time looking at my calendar and suggesting available times to people. I spend a few minutes looking over my calendar to prepare an email that includes something like this:
That looks simple, right? Why do I need a tool to help do that? Because I do this all the time, and every time it takes 3-5 minutes to scan my calendar and suggest times. …AND, if I’m booking an appointment in a different time zone, I like to be nice and translate it to the other party’s local time zone, which takes another second or two. …AND since I book a lot of appointments, my calendar is constantly changing, so and every time I want to suggest some available times, I have to go back and do it again. I’m not one to enjoy repetitive tasks, so I looked for a solution.
I used Xobni for Outlook because it has a nice feature called “Schedule time with so and so” that will look at your calendar and automatically prepare an email to someone with suggestions for upcoming available times when you can meet. But I couldn’t find anything like this for Google Calendar, hence this Gadget.
It’s a tool that can look at your calendar and create a list of available times that you can easily copy and paste into an email message. All you do is install it, tell it how many days out you want appointments, the timezone, and how much buffer you want between your existing appointments (to avoid getting booked on back-to-back meetings) and you’ll have a list of times that you can easily copy-and-paste into email whenever you need it.