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”

So how do people book appointments with you?

When you create your appointment slot and you click on “Edit Details” it will bring up some details including a VERY long website link.  Google “URL Shortner” and copy and paste that link to get a shortened version of that URL (eg: https://goo.gl/ )

Your shortened URL can then be sent to everyone to click on and to book your appointment slots.  This link will be linked to ALL your future appointment slots as well. 

If you need to have constant one-on-one meetings (for example every week), then just click the repeat box and set up your appointment slots to repeat as needed.

This is an incredibly powerful tool for when managing one-on-one meetings with departments and staff. Brilliant when you need to set up performance review meetings, or feedback sessions etc.    Create an appointment slot (as per your manager’s requirements) and then send an email to all staff with the link and tell staff to please book an appointment – first come first serve.  Let them fight the battle for the perfect time slot while you sit back and sip that well deserved cup of coffee!

Written for OPSA by Marié Mieny

Marié Mieny is an administrator within the School of IT at Monash South Africa (MSA).  She has been at MSA for 13 years of which 7 years have been in the School of IT

Marié has a reputation for revolutionising the mundane tasks she is given by using technology to make her very efficient and effective in her job. As a result her school is one of the top schools at MSA with a reputation of being highly organised and effective.

Marié has two honours degrees – one in Criminology and one in Psychology.  She plans on doing her Masters in the near future

1 thought on “Techno Tuesday – Google Calendar Appointment Slots

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