Time Management

Agenda panic: Rendez-vous Nightmares

Today there’s panic on the Julie Desk Blog: all your worst agenda nightmares have set up meetings (Please note the dazzling wordplay) to properly celebrate Halloween.

Warning: Certain images risk injuring the sensibilities of young people or those who remain unwarned.

1. Organizing meetings with people with overbooked agendas

– “Wanna meet next Tuesday?
– Nope, not free.Thursday afternoon?
– Nope can’t. Monday the week after?
– Nope can’t either.
– …”

Does this look familiar?

This is one of those agenda planning nightmares: endless back and forth email exchanges until you finally agree on a date. Its an infernal back and forth that quickly turns sour…

[We’ve warned you for images…]

Alexis Normand, Director of Health Relations at Nokia Health agrees:Making meetings is a repetitive and annoying task. One can spend hours verifying availability, juggling different emails to find a date that is convenient for everyone, cancelling and then rescheduling a new date. It’s a never-ending puzzle.

Furthermore, as explained by Ferdinand Roth, Data Scientist at Julie Desk, Artificial intelligence objectively considers the quality of each time slot in one’s agenda (such as travel time or grouping together meetings). AI is thus better at performing this task than a human! So why bother?

2. Rescheduling or cancelling a rendez-vous

After a fun Halloween, you wake up and realize you have well, not the best of looks…

You know you can’t go to a meeting like that! But how can you cancel them? It could take hours to contact everyone and reschedule one by one, unless you delegate the task…

Sandra Legrand, founder of Conf&Co says, “When something unexpected comes up, Julie takes care of rescheduling, which frees up time for me to be more efficient in my time management.”

3. Following Up on Meeting Invites

You’ve gotten in touch with a number of important people and have sent them emails to plan meetings but they haven’t answered! You’re overbooked on your end and you forget to follow-up, so much so that your guests end up completely forgetting too!

Christophe Amouroux, President at Twelve Consulting says, “Before, when someone didn’t answer my meeting requests, I would forget to follow-up and in the end, the meeting wouldn’t happen. Thanks to her follow-up function, Julie takes care of follow-ups without ever insisting.

4. Reserving a Meeting Room

It’s the big day! You’ve finally been able to plan a meeting with important partners. Everyone arrives at the right time: But the room is already taken!

You’ve forgotten to reserve a meeting room! If only you’d asked Julie, you wouldn’t have had to have this meeting in the middle of the hallway!

5. Scheduling recruitment interviews

Are you recruiting ? That’s great! But appointments are piling up and so is the task of scheduling recruitment interviews. It becomes so hard to manage that you end up asking yourself if you shouldn’t just delete the offer completely…

Before opting for such a radical solution, try automating your recruitment process: “The combination of Workable and Julie Desk works perfectly and has allowed me to save at least 1 to 2 days of work,” says Julien Hobeika, CEO at Julie Desk.

6. Managing Time Zones for International Meetings

You know those apps for appointments? Well, here’s my story: A freelancer sends me a link to schedule a meeting. I say, alright, I’ll make an effort and consult my calendar, look at my contact’s availability and click on a time that seems convenient for both parties. I then receive an invitation in my calendar for a meeting 1 hour earlier than expected! Well, it turns out that I hadn’t noticed my contact’s time zone was different. I had to cancel the meeting and start all over. True story.
More than 15 minutes were wasted trying to plan this meeting, when a simple email to Julie would have sufficed.It’s enough to make you go crazy…

Michael Ferranti, VP Marketing says, “I travel quite a bit in my work and organizing meetings while managing time zones is the worst! I skipped out on quite a few meetings because I couldn’t organize them. Today, I put Julie on copy and she takes care of the rest.

7. Calculating travel time between two meetings

Are you tired of running from one meeting to another?

To better organize your agenda, when Julie proposes time slots for meetings, she considers travel time between your first meeting and your second. Great, right?

8. Getting into the building…

I’m sure this has happened to you: You’ve arrived at the building lobby, but you don’t have the door code! It’s very frustrating, and it can be dangerous to stand by the door…

Luckily, every one of Julie’s meeting invitations contains all the information necessary to access meeting rooms.

9. Adding Availability on Multiple Calendars

We all have our little secrets, like a hidden life that we don’t necessarily want to share with everyone…

The thing is, in managing different lives, one can mix things up and coordinate multiple meetings at once. How can you avoid this situation? You guessed it: you can share multiple calendars with Julie so that she can account for all of your agendas and plan your meetings accordingly.

10. Having Unwanted Meetings in One’s Agenda

You’re afraid that in delegating your meetings to Julie, certain people will take advantage and that at the end, you’ll find yourself with meetings that you don’t want in your agenda! There are of course, people that we don’t want to see…

Don’t be afraid, Julie knows who is in your trust circle!

These were terrifying rendez-vous nightmares! So the next time you plan your meetings, think about it, would you rather, “ trick or treat”?

HAPPY HALLOWEEN !!