I don’t go to many meet­ings as I find they are largely a waste of time. In fact, I have the fol­low­ing poster on my office wall to remind every­one who walks in not to ask me to attend a meeting!

But I’m now a chief inves­ti­ga­tor of an NHMRC grant and I have to meet with other mem­bers of the team from time to time. We’ve started using Doo­dle to sched­ule our meet­ings, and it is so good I thought I should share it.

Doo­dle is a cloud-​​based way to sched­ule a meet­ing (or any event). Here is how it works.

1. The per­son orga­niz­ing the meet­ing selects some poten­tial times and dates on Doo­dle, and then sends an email to all par­tic­i­pants with a link to a page where they can reg­is­ter their availability.
2. Each per­son who receives the email clicks on the link and adds their avail­abil­ity to each of the pos­si­ble times/​dates.
3. The meet­ing orga­nizer can then see a sim­ple table show­ing when the best time for the meet­ing is.

This sim­ple pro­ce­dure saves a lot of emails and phone calls try­ing to sort out the best time.

I’ve since dis­cov­ered some other web-​​services that are sim­i­lar. The best of these seems to be Sched­uleOnce – I’ll be using it from now on. Of course, I’d still rather not go to any meet­ings, but if it is really nec­es­sary, using Sched­uleOnce saves some time in sched­ul­ing when the meet­ing should be held.

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