As a busy financial planning professional, I send out many requests for meetings, conference calls, and other events throughout each week.  Some are fairly easy to schedule, such as one-on-one time with a co-worker, but every so often there are times where I need to send a request to numerous individuals and make a futile attempt to work around their own busy schedules.

Fortunately, I have been able to avoid sending out a flurry of emails to attempt to schedule an event as I have come across two unique web utilities.  I have been using Doodle for a while and recently discovered When Is Good through a recent Lifehacker post.

Doodle

Doodle is a simple scheduling utility that I found works well when I need to identify a specific day when invitees are available.  For example, if I need to coordinate a local FPA chapter social, I’ll turn to Doodle.  I know I’ll schedule the social to start at 5:00 in the afternoon, but I need to know what date will allow the most invitees to attend.

In three easy steps, I can create a Doodle poll that lists any number of days I need to gather availability from my invitees; so far I’ve only needed about a two week range of dates.  I don’t know the maximum number of days permitted by Doodle, but I can’t imagine needing more than one month’s worth for a practical poll.

When I finish the poll, I send out the custom URL to the invitees and the responses pour in. 

Doodle automatically tallys the various dates people are available and identifies the date with the most positive responses. 

After a good number of responses, I delete the poll and send out the official invitation or meeting request.  No more back and forth email threads and brain scratching trying to figure out how to best accommodate a dozen different schedules.

When Is Good

Doodle works well when all I need to know is the best day for an event, but When Is Good (WIG) expands on the scheduling by offering specific times for events.

Like Doodle, creating an event is simple and is done in three steps.  But WIG already has one hour time slots for each day selected, unlike Doodle where the poll creator needs to manually type in the time slots.  WIG also recognizes local time zones allowing each user to select the appropriate one when entering availability.  Doodle doesn’t do that (yet).  Finish the meeting and get a URL for the calendar interface.

All invitees need to do is open the WIG calendar and “paint” the times they are available to meet.  WIG internally overlays all of the responses and displays only the times that all users are available.

If you want to see the specific times each user selected as available, you can click their name in the bottom of the window to add or remove their selection.

An End to Conflicts

These two utilities have come in extremely handy for a variety of activities that I’ve scheduled.  I’m very pleased that I no longer need to mentally juggle schedules or create a one-off spreadsheet to track various responses. 

Hopefully you’ll get some value out of these utilities that ends up saving time and eliminating stress.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 at 4:29 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.