Meet My New Assistant, Calendly

I've always told myself that once I have a personal assistant, I'll know I've made it career wise. I despise scheduling meetings, it takes up way too much time. Since I started working, I've been looking forward to the day someone else schedules my meetings.

I'm happy to announce that I now have a personal assistant, it's Calendly. Ok, so it's not a human, but it's software that has taken the pain out of scheduling meetings.

I schedule a lot of meetings. To schedule a meeting with a co-worker is pretty straightforward and easy with our internal systems, but try to set up a meeting with someone not at your company and it's a lot more work. I'm meeting with people every week outside of my company, people in the industry, students or even catching up with different professional contacts. The time is takes to set up these meetings adds up.

Calendly makes this really easy and is saving me at least 30 minutes a week. This is how it works.

Step 1. Sign up for Calendly
Step 2. Sync it with your calendar
Step 3. Set up different types of meetings that you have, filling in each one with important details like, what time of day you prefer, call-in information and a ton more. See examples of all my meetings.

Step 4. When someone wants to meet with you send them a link and it will show them when you are available to meet by automatically checking your calendar and seamlessly creating an invite with all the right details you pre-populated like where meet or what number to call.

If you get a lot of people requesting to meet with you, this is a must have tool. It's not often a piece of software comes along and has such a quick impact on my work, but Calendly really has saved me time.

There is been so much talk of AI lately, that this is a good reminder that great software can be better than AI.