Have you ever tried to coordinate a dinner amongst friends and realize that it takes tons of emails to agree on the most available date and time? Don't even get me started about choosing the restaurant...Similarly up until a year ago, I had found that I spent a good deal of email time just trying to set up meetings for work. Life in academics inevitably involves in-person and conference call meetings with people who have extremely busy schedules.
I've always thought that there's GOT to be a technological solution to make this process easier and save you time. And walla, there is.
Doodle.com, a Swiss-based company, is a FREE and very user-friendly website, which allows users to input their availability for a particular meeting. The website then displays the best dates/times when people are free to meet.
In brief, it is a scheduling wizard (my shout-out to the great Harry Potter movie debut this week).
As a meeting coordinator, all you have to do is to name the "event" and select a list of dates and times. Doodle does the rest. It generates a unique link which you can email to the meeting attendees. These attendees then click the times when they are available. With each user entry, the software collates all the information, such as below (click image to see larger size):
Another really nice feature is that you can set the time zone. This is especially helpful for conference calls across time zones.I'm always on the losing end of conference calls, since I'm on the west coast. I have frequent conference calls with CDEM Executive Committee members, most of whom are on the east coast. The early morning calls are a variant of torture, for those of us who are night owls.