Whether it's a meeting with clients, prospects, or team members, or even just setting out time for administrative tasks, scheduling has always been crucial to business operations.
In the US alone, there are 17 million business meetings every day.
Without an up-to-date and user-friendly system for digitally scheduling these appointments, you are just as likely to spend time searching for and squabbling over meeting rooms as you spend time using them.
The typical Professional spends roughly 31 hours in meetings each month!
Even if it takes some time by itself when you factor in the time required to arrange and select the meeting location, send invitations, prepare reminders and more - the hours quickly build up. On the other hand, since meetings are unavoidable, the solution is to spend less time scheduling them.
The right software and scheduling solutions can streamline meetings, boost productivity, and improve collaboration.
Why is scheduling so important?
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The majority of people's lives in the modern world revolve around appointments. Both personally and professionally, we are obsessed with balancing our schedules and finding the time to manage projects, cultivate leads, help clients, and broaden our networks.
We are constantly striving to schedule 1 more meeting, complete more work, and achieve greater success! (Learn why we want meetings)
Appointments typically take about 12 minutes to set up (on average), but this time can increase if two busy people are circling each other trying to line up their calendars.
Additionally, these meetings are often affected due to factors outside of our control, such as:
Back and Fourths communication on external availability- Other priorities that can take over our main tasks
- Meetings not being relevant to either party
- Appointments overrun due to not properly structuring the meeting and its timing
- Risk of having no-shows or latecomers which wastes precious time
This eats up even more of our precious time on the calendar stopping us from progressing with other essential tasks.
How can we minimize this to ensure we can maximize appointments and effectiveness?
How can we reduce the uncertainty surrounding scheduling these appointments given that professionals want them to happen and that the majority of them are crucial to pushing the business forward to greater success?
Increasing turn-up rate of appointments
In order to decrease the number of no-shows and late arrivals to appointments, it is crucial to make sure that everyone is aware of the scheduled appointments in advance. Reminders and clear notifications regarding the appointment's time and location can help with this.
You may also intelligently reallocate your time while moving on with other duties by giving participants the choice to reschedule and, in certain cases, cancel appointments in advance.
(Check out our Built-In Reminders)
Increase the relevance of appointments
Establishing the goal of an appointment is crucial when assessing what will happen at the session; occasionally, an appointment won't be required to produce the desired results.
Appointment qualification is a crucial step that can take some time initially (but doesn't have to), but it will guarantee the best results from your appointments and make the most use of your time!
(Learn how the Relevance of Meetings can be improved)
Improve the structure of appointments
Appointments with clear agendas make it possible for both the user and the participant to anticipate how the meeting will proceed. This guarantees that the appointment will go as planned and be efficient.
This is essential to get the most out of the meeting and avoid wasting your client's or your time given your hectic schedules.
(Learn more about Meeting Standards)
Overall Better Etiquette for scheduling meetings
For best success, scheduling time with other parties is extremely important and must be addressed with respect.
It takes good discipline and politeness to follow good practice to persuade others to give you their time in order to complete the first step of a great connection.
(Learn more about Professional Etiquette)
Reducing time on Back & Forth
Learning to communicate more efficiently through email can save you countless hours of back-and-forth messages and free up more time to focus on what actually matters
Cut down the long conversations to quick, simple replies and direct, detailed communication.
(Learn more about Effective Time Management)
How to Solve these Scheduling Problems?
Achieving the right balance is possible manually, however, it takes a long time to do effectively. There are lots of proven alternatives which can be done to achieve optimal results while not requiring you to clone yourself.
(Learn more about Manual vs Automated Scheduling)
Having a Personal Assistant to help you out, makes sure you’re never double-booking yourself. You check in with your assistant each morning, so you know exactly what you have planned for the day ahead, then debrief each evening to make sure you haven’t missed anything for the next day.
You can do this easily automatically via automations such as automated calendar management software or scheduling tool to handle each of those problems. This is because, with automation, you can spend more time in meetings or on other crucial business tasks.
If you would like to double your productivity, you can have a PA with calendar management software which will make both your and your PA's lives easier as Bookings are handled through automations and the PA can take the manual additions (like follow-ups) straight after.
For all its convenience, we happen to do all of those things we discussed in this article and more all under a Booking Page!
Different people have different needs, and many of the solutions we mentioned can be done manually which can take some time. But with a Scheduling tool like CatchApp, you can do this all within the product effectively and reduce the time taken to schedule. Find out how it works here!
Need a Scheduling Etiquette?
Check what we learned from our customers here!
Life in the business fast-lane doesn't always have to be so difficult, but with CatchApp Bookings, your scheduling can be taken care of in the most efficient way possible.
Sign up here to get started.
CatchApp. Scheduling, genius.
