Even in distributed teams that work asynchronously, managing calendars is incredibly important. In an office, everyone knows that everyone else is there between 9am and 5pm – it's easy to book meetings at short notice, or grab someone for a quick coffee.
In a remote setting, things are a little different:
- People can be in different timezones – there may only be very small windows for synchronous meetings.
- People are free to schedule their time in a way that suits them – you may find some folks start work early or late. Some will head to the gym during the normal working day, have a long lunch with their family, or take a nap in the afternoon.
- Asynchronous working enables people to dedicate long stretches to uninterrupted work, where they'll often have notifications disabled.
To make this work, we need to be a little more disciplined with calendars than we would in an office. This lesson will look briefly at some of the things we can do that make calendaring work well.
Setting Things Up
There are three things we can do to make calendaring easier for us:
Expose your calendar
Other people should be able to subscribe to your calendar and see what you have on. This helps them decide when's best to book meetings with you. It's helpful if you expose the full details of your meetings (rather than just busy/free) so people can take a guess at the state of mind you're likely to be in.
Subscribe to other people's calendars
It's a good idea to subscribe to your team-mates calendars so you can toggle them on and off in the sidebar.
Show multiple timezones in your calendar
If you work with people in multiple timezones, you should add the ones you use most frequently to your calendar.
Scheduling Meetings
To schedule a meeting:
- Add the people you want to attend in the invitees field, marking anyone who doesn’t need to be there as optional.
- Look for a slot that suites all attendees.
- Add an event to your calendar and give it a descriptive name and brief agenda (in the notes). Ensure it has a videoconferencing link attached.
Blocking out personal time
If you have personal events where you’ll be unavailable to join meetings, add them to your calendar so other people in the company can see them. This might include one-off stuff like hospital appointments, or regular events like picking the kids up from school.
You could also consider blocking out a few chunks of focus time every week, where you are not never available for calls. Bear in mind that the more focus time you block out, the harder it will be fore other folks to find times that work for everyone.
Meeting invites
If you want to ask if someone's available, check their calendar and just send a calendar invite - they can decline if they need to. This is usually much more efficient than having a long conversation about timings over slack or email.
When you receive a meeting invite, make sure you accept or decline it. If you accept, people will expect you to attend. If you decline, people will know you can't make it and can act accordingly. If you don't respond at all, people will have no idea of your intentions.
It's perfectly fine to accept an invite and then decline it later, though it's always a good idea to tell the organizer on Slack if you do this.
Wherever possible, avoid declining meetings shortly before they start – especially if you know your attendance is necessary for that meeting!
Some more tip tips if you use Google Calendar…
If you are declining a meeting, always propose a new time or reach out to the person who scheduled it and try to find a slot that works for everyone.
Allow others to modify your events by default.
- Navigate to guest permissions section when editing your event.
- Check the box next to the modify event
Moving or cancelling meetings
If you want to move a meeting just move the calendar appointment instead of reaching out via other channels like slack. If you move a meeting with short notice, it might be a good idea to drop a message in Slack.
When you need to cancel a meeting, delete/decline the event and choose the option 'Delete and update guests' so everyone knows you can't attend.
Agendas
There’s some advice on different types of meeting and the agendas they require later in Meetings , but as a general rule every meeting should have some sort of agenda so everyone involved knows what's on the table. (Except social meetings)
For an ad-hoc one-to-one meeting, this might just be a slack message like this:
For a larger meeting, it should be a document that all the attendees can contribute to beforehand.
Summary & Key Points
Using calendars well is especially important in distributed companies. By following the advice here you'll go a long way towards getting this right.