Calendar of Availability

I love finding technology solutions to organizational problems or annoyances in my life. Here is one I used to encounter all the time:

The annoyance: Someone wants to book a meeting or appointment with me, so I email them 4 or 5 time slots that work for me. 2 days later they email back and choose an option. I go check my calendar and discover that I have since booked another meeting in that time slot. So now we have to begin the whole dance again and it takes days or weeks to finally arrange a time to meet.

The issue: The problem here is that when the other person decided to choose a meeting time, they were referring to my email, which represented a 2-day old version of my availability. If only, at that moment, they could have been looking at my up-to-date calendar.

Solution: Step 1, get my full calendar into a digital calendar tool. Step 2, find a way to have this digital calendar viewable online by others in a free/busy type view.

I will briefly explain my specific solution to this.

I use Google Calendar. It's awesome. There are many, many reasons why it is awesome. One of them is the concept of multiple calendars. Each different category of appointment in my calendar is it's own separate calendar that I can overlay on top of each other. This will come in very handy when I choose which calendars to publish in the next step.

Google Calendar has an option where I can embed a particular view of my calendar in a web page. First I went into the settings for each calendar which I wanted to display and checked off Make this Calendar Public, but also checked off Share only free/busy (hide details).

Next I went into Calendar settings, to the Embed This Calendar section and clicked on the link to Customize... Here I chose which calendars to include in my view, some other options on appearance, and then I copy-pasted the code that was generated.

I then went to NVu, a free web page editing program, I created a simple web page and pasted in the code. I uploaded this web page to my web hosting space and now I have a web page where you can check on my availability.

So now when someone requests a meeting with me, I simply email them and say "have a look at my calendar and find a time that works for you: www.tinyurl.com/jeffcal"

If you'd like to talk more about online calendar or organizational ideas I'd be happy to meet with you. Just send me an email and we'll go back and forth several times trying to arrange.... or then again maybe just visit my calendar a suggest a time to meet!

Jeff