Do you want to learn how to schedule a meeting the right way?
Are you looking for practical time management tips that will make the process quicker and simpler?
In this article, you’ll learn about three simple ways to schedule a meeting with care in your business.
Why Should You Learn How to Schedule a Meeting?
“Schedule meeting” is on many business owner’s and entrepreneurs to-do lists.
But why should you even take time out of your busy day to learn how to schedule a meeting?
You can just pick an open space and drop in the meeting, right?
Maybe you have an executive assistant to help you with meetings.
You don’t need to learn this stuff, do you?
Actually, learning how to schedule a meeting correctly will have many helpful aspects to you and your calendar.
Usability
For starters, when you learn how to schedule a meeting, it’s a skill you’ll often use in life.
You can use it not only for business meetings, but for personal meetings as well.
This can be particularly helpful if you’re trying to cultivate better work life balance for yourself.
What’s more, when you learn how to schedule events in your calendar, you’ll get better at it.
This will be a big help when you need to book more meetings or be more discerning with your time and energy.
With practice, you’ll be able to gauge whether or not a meeting is truly necessary in the first place.
Practicality
Like many things in this world, a meeting is not unto itself.
There’s many things that need to happen before, during, and after a meeting.
You must have the time and space to mentally and physically prepare yourself for an upcoming meeting.
Scheduling a meeting without prior planning is not only embarrassing, but has the potential to put you and your business in a negative light.
What You Should Keep in Mind When You Schedule a Meeting
Scheduling a meeting in your calendar means you’ll have to spend some time preparing for your meeting.
At a very basic level you will need to consider preparation time for:
- Preparing meeting materials, resources, documents, and tools
- Briefing fellow meeting presenters or managers
- Create a well-organized meeting agenda and/or speaking points
- Preparing the physical meeting space or virtual room
- Making travel arrangement or setting up virtual call technology
- Scheduling a meeting debrief session after your meeting
- Creating a next steps plan so you can work on tasks and assignments
What are the Benefits When You Schedule a Meeting Well
You’ve successfully scheduled a meeting.
So what can you expect in your daily experience when you’ve successfully done so?
Here are some potential benefits of scheduling a meeting well:
- Sufficient preparation time for the meeting
- Feel more relaxed and prepared for the meeting
- Reduce potential errors, mistakes, or delays in meeting preparations
- Allows you to focus on unrelated work tasks, assignments, and projects
- Respect other people’s time and energy in preparing for and attending the meeting
3 Simple Ways to Schedule a Meeting
You’re keen to schedule a meeting in your busy calendar.
Yet you’ve fallen into the habit of scheduling appointments in your calendar simply because there’s available space.
An overbooked calendar doesn’t allow for flexibility and growth in your business.
You need to practice discernment to ensure your schedule works for you.
Here are three tips to help you schedule a meeting so it flows with your professional schedule.
Consider your potential availability
If you want to schedule a meeting and you see an available space in your calendar, you should schedule the meeting for that time, right?
Unfortunately, this approach will work only for certain types of appointments that are somewhat predictive and repetitive in nature.
It doesn’t quite work if one’s schedule varies in the type, depth, and breadth of meetings.
Instead of simply just choosing the nearest available slot for a meeting, view it as a potential slot instead.
You now have the potential to schedule a meeting within that or any other slot in your calendar. As such, you truly do have a wealth of choices available to you.
Making such a shift in your mindset allows you to evaluate and locate the most suitable spot in your calendar for that meeting.
It forces you to think carefully about your choices, rather than scheduling a meeting at random.
What potential slot makes the most scheduling sense for you at this very moment?
Review your schedule as a whole
This step helps to remind you what is in your schedule before, during, and after your proposed meeting.
Appointments tend to be scheduled weeks in advance, so this step serves as a last-minute check on your weekly and monthly workflow.
Here’s how this works in action: Let’s say you have a busy month filled with meetings with clients.
Your calendar is almost full, save for a few slots that you keep open for emergency meetings.
If you want to schedule a non-urgent networking meeting, this probably wouldn’t be a suitable time to do so.
You’re busy as is with your clients and all the other regular work in your business.
You may wish to schedule the networking meeting for the following month.
The overview might seem like an unnecessary step, but it is well worth doing.
It only takes a moment to check the contents of a calendar to better understand your overall availability.
Evaluate your daily schedule
Each day is different as a business owner.
That’s why it’s so valuable to understand what you’ll be doing and where you’ll be on any given day of the week.
Open your calendar and mentally walk yourself through each day of the week. You should get an overall sense of your workload, type, and travel for the day.
For instance, you may find you’ll visit three different locations on Monday.
Perhaps you’ll work on five client projects in your office on Wednesday. Or you may find you’re meeting with a vendor on Thursday for a check-in.
Using this knowledge, how might you structure your day so that you have sufficient time and space in your calendar?
Do you need to set aside more time for travel? How about transitioning from one type of work to the next? What do you need to prepare in advance of a meeting?
These are all important considerations to address when you review your daily schedule.
The more thoughtful you can be in scheduling meetings and appointments now, the less likely you’ll have to change your schedule at a later date.
Learn How to Schedule Meetings with Care
Scheduling meetings is one of many different responsibilities of yours in running a business.
But if you want to schedule meetings efficiently, then you need to learn how to do it right.
Fortunately, a little bit of practice can go along way in helping you schedule meetings that are both efficient and effective.
A version of this article originally appeared on Inc.com.
In case we haven’t yet met virtually, it’s nice to meet you! Hi, I’m Rashelle Isip, The Order Expert®, productivity coach for entrepreneurs, small business owners, and professionals.
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