Techno Tuesday – Google Calendar Appointment Slots

This week my colleague had a problem. She was stressed because she had to call about 20-30 people to come and see her in her office.  This meant that she would have to spend time trying to contact each person, and try negotiate a suitable time, and what if that person wasn't available?  This was causing stress, and taking up valuable time.

I introduced her to Google Appointment Slots.  If you are using the Google Calendar, then take note of this.  Google Appointment slots is a brilliant invention that puts the responsibility of booking appointments onto what I would like to call the “requestor”.  You just create the slots at any time suitable to you and send your personal appointment link to anyone who needs to make an appointment with you. That’s it and you are done!

The advantages are numerous.  For starters, you are assured to be available at the time that person needs to see you.  You have proof that you saw that person (good when you need to justify your time to your boss).  You can change the appointment slots if you suddenly need to and Google Calendar will send a notification to the ‘requestor’ to alert them that change was made to their appointment slot.  You will be in control and can manage your time more effectively. You can slot your appointments on a specific day at a specific time and you can work around that.

So how do you do this?

When you go into Google Calendar click at the time you want to have your appointment slot. When the box appears it is automatically defaulted to “Event” (in bold). Next to that is “Appointment Slot”.  That is what you need to click on. 

You then need to create an appointment and give it a name ( for example, Performance Meetings, or Feedback sessions etc). You can then offer as slots of 10 minutes, 30 minutes 60 minutes etc.  You decide. Click on “Edit Details”