Best Practices: Meeting with Non-Org Guests
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If your schedule needs to have the flexibility to meet with external parties – be they clients or customers, external vendors, or interviewees – it’s important to build your best schedule for meeting face-to-face and preserving time for deep-work. With some adjustments that focus your meeting hours with intentionality, it’s possible to find a balance for your best schedule.
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Set your day up for success
Set your meeting hours
By default, Clockwise assumes that your meeting hours match your working hours. By setting different meeting hours, you can target hours that are reserved for meeting with both your own organization and with those outside of it. This allows you to set up more protected time so that you’re able to work and focus with less interruption.
Make lunch very flexible
Lunch holds ensure that you get the time you need to take care of yourself, eat, and recharge your energy, and it’s important to honor your breaks in your day. By making when you take your lunch as flexible as you’re comfortable with, you’re giving room for meetings to shift. These shifts can accommodate your external guests and internal folks while making sure you take a break.
Note: Using lunch holds creates a block of busy time on your calendar, which will be inflexible. If you occasionally work in a scenario that you wish to allow others to book over your lunch hold to provide maximum flexibility, you can edit your event availability to reflect free. This may not be done in bulk and affects only the individual event you alter availability for.
Be aware doing this ends the flexibility of your lunch and it will no longer move – it can absolutely create a double-booked situation if someone needs the time your lunch is scheduled for.
Give yourself breaks
If your line of work consistently requires writing up extensive post-conversation notes after meeting with a customer or interviewee, consider turning on meeting breaks as an every-meeting cadence. While this won’t work as well if you spend a lot of time going to internal meetings, this is a great solution to ensure you have post-meeting wrap-up time.
You can enable meeting breaks in Ideal Day.
Plan ahead for minimal disturbance
Enable travel time
If you’ve returned to office or else have the occasional meeting in a place different from your normal workplace, enabling travel time will allow you to take the stress of running mental math off your shoulders. Using calculated estimates based on geo coordinates for the distance between your normal workplace (set in Ideal Day) and your event’s location, Clockwise will put an event titled Travel time on your calendar to reserve the appropriate amount of time for the average commute by car between yourself and the destination.
By enabling travel time, the events placed on your calendar anticipate when you’ll be unavailable, which helps reflect your actual availability much more clearly to those considering a meeting time with you. Especially if you’re someone who plans ahead and offers a large range of time to choose from when meeting with you, travel time can help solve conflict weeks ahead of time.
Sync personal events to avoid conflict
Gone are the days of having to contact someone to reschedule because of a conflict you forgot to block out on your work calendar.
To avoid conflict with your personal life, it’s often a good idea to incorporate Personal Calendar Sync for your account if you have a Google-based personal (or business, using a different domain than your Clockwise account’s) calendar. The sync puts Busy holds on your work calendar when you have a personal commitment you’ve RSVPed to from your personal calendar. With a sync of 2- or 3-weeks in advance, this feature reserves space to minimize conflict in your schedule when allowing others to book time with you.
Ask attendee questions to get off on the right foot
When using Scheduling Links, you have an opportunity to connect with your attendees ahead of a meeting to gather information. By using attendee questions, you can gather details that can affect the conversation and lead the direction of your conversation.
The answers to these questions become the event description in the booked event, visible to all parties.
Protect your Focus Time
Consider your Scheduling Links flexibility settings
Depending on how many folks have access to an evergreen Scheduling Link you have set up, you may want to consider adjusting your focus protection. This can be adjusted at any time with a live link and its change reflects immediately for the next time its URL loads, whether you want to offer more availability, preserve your Focus Time goals, or strike a balance between what is offered and what remains invisible to a future attendee.
Share meeting responsibility
If you work with a team of folks in a similar role as yourself, consider using round-robin functionality, which can divide the responsibility of hosting a meeting with a non-org guest equally amongst all potential hosts.
Keep in mind that all potential hosts with the same scheduling priority offers all available times for hosting by default (maximum availability), so if your calendar is considerably lighter or busier than the rest of the available teammates, you’ll host fewer or a greater amount of meetings than anyone else respectively. This setting works best for teammates with similarly balanced calendars, or for those who have lower scheduling priority than other teammates within the round robin setup.
