Patrick reminded us a decade ago that Everything Happens in Time, said another way: “everything happens at a time – whether deliberate or not.”
It’s been three and a half years since I wrote about my ever evolving calendaring practice. Everything I wrote about in 2022 is still true. The biggest change has been in that time is my heavy use of cal.com as a scheduling service for conversations with clients, prospects, customers of clients, friends, everyone and everything.
Heavily using a scheduling service like Cal.com is great, but I’ve found it requires a couple of non-obvious changes to my calendaring practice.
- My commitments are now split across 2 calendars; “Committed” and “Tentative”. As I described in 2022, all my hard commitments – my morning run, prep & next steps for client meetings, travel time to & from in-person meetings, fixed personal commitments – whether to myself or others goes, into “Committed”. Everything else goes into “Tentative”. Cal.com integrates with “Committed”. Yes, this means stuff on “Tentative” may get over-ridden – and that’s OK. If there’s nothing on “Committed”, I’m not wondering how to make the best use of the new found time, I’ve got a plan. There’s probably a cleaner way to solve this, but at this point, it’s working fine.
- Some people prefer I declare the date & time. So, if only to keep things moving, I’ve needed to create an Event Type within Cal.com for the times where I’m handle the scheduling. By scheduling it myself – rather than creating a normal calendar event and inviting the person – I still get Cal.com’s auto-population of a video conferencing URL, reminders the day before, and a rescheduling link.
I have 3 standard durations; 30min, 45min, 60min. At a certain level of clarity, every conversation can fit within a 30min or 45min block.
The great thing about Cal.com (and other scheduling tools) is setting a minimum time between bookings, I set it at 15min, and I’ve found it so helpful that I now even space my own commitments by 15min.