Boss: “Jeremy, why don’t you set up that meeting? Thanks.”
Don’t get me wrong, I have a great boss, but sometimes I get the impression he thinks bringing diverse people together is a trivial task. It sounds like he is giving me the easiest job of the year, essentially a gift from him to me. But if this is a gift, it’s like a gift of poop. 95% of my meetings look like this:
- communicating asynchronously by email
- participants at different institutions
- participants are hopelessly busy
- participants are in different time zones (more on this later…)
Common scheduling methods that lead to insanity
Many of my unenlightened colleagues try to organize meetings using email, applying one of the following ridiculous approaches:
- send an email to the group asking for times when people are available, or:
- pick a date and time you think is good, announce it, and hope you don’t get complaints
Approach #1 always results in an avalanche of email, in multiple waves. Half the respondents reply to all, the other half reply to the sender only. Some of the participants read all emails, some read only the first one received, some read only the last one received, and many of them don’t read past the first line. All of these failings result in … more email! Eventually your meeting may get scheduled, but at the cost of your mental health.
Approach #2, while demonstrating an admirable level of confidence, does not work and degenerates into approach #1.
If your life is simple and everyone you work with is in the same institution, using the same calendar system, like for example MS Outlook, you probably have some options. For example, I know you can send out a meeting request in Outlook that comes into everyone’s email box, and they can accept it or reject it. It’s not really much more advanced than just sending a regular email. It’s possible there are fancier ways of doing this (I’m not an Outlook expert), but if non-Outlook users are involved, it won’t do you any good anyway.
It seems obvious that since people use different calendar and email applications, the only way to go is with an easy-to-use web application that does not require an account.
Doodle to the rescue
It turns out this really simple and intuitive web tool does exactly what I want:
You don’t even need to create an account; just go to the website, give minimal information, set up the list of possible times, and forward the email you get to your colleagues. Then wait for them to go to the intuitive interface and select the times they like. It shows you all the “poll results” and tells you which time is best. Beautiful. The only downside is that not everyone in the world uses it yet!
Doodle also has time zone support, but you have to click to enable it. Then when the other participants make their votes, they select their own time zone and the time slots you list are translated appropriately.
Doodle extensions
Doodle had an API contest, and here are the submissions: http://doodle.com/blog/english/api-contest/
The winner was Doodlendar, a mashup of Doodle and Google Calendar. It’s a neat idea, but when I tried it I found it to be unacceptably slow. Just clicking once to select a date for the meeting resulted in a huge delay.
There is also a Doodle plug-in for Outlook, which I installed and tried out briefly. It puts a little toolbar at the top of the screen in Outlook, and you click “Add”, click on a date, and then “Create poll”, which opens up the Doodle page in your browser. One annoyance is when you click on a date, there is no visual feedback showing you which dates you’ve selected. A window pops up for a split second and disappears, but it’s not a nice interface. The poll creation part of the plug-in is not much better than just bookmarking doodle.com in your browser. It does come with plug-ins for IE and Firefox, though, that let you save the selected time to your calendar. I don’t think I’ll be using it unless they make big improvements.
Doodle for iPhone!
Sorry, not yet. I emailed the company working on this (Neoos GmbH) and they said they did create a working version for the Doodle API contest, but it’s not ready for public release. I’ll be anxiously awaiting this app!
I am very impressed with Doodle, but I’ll continue looking for tools like this.