Making it Easy to Schedule With You

Posted byLeo Herzog Leave a comment on Making it Easy to Schedule With You

There are a few neat tools at your disposal that can automate the process of scheduling one-on-one meetings with you. This is great for advising season or other one-on-one meetings that you have often with colleagues or students!

Before we go on, all of the following is predicated on you keeping your Google Calendar up-to-date. People can’t schedule with you if they don’t know your availability! Your 1Hope Account comes with built-in free calendaring, and it’s really good. You should use it!

Option #1 — Google Calendar Appointment Scheduling

Google Calendar has a built-in appointment scheduling feature. You choose the details or your event, such as event name, location, duration, and the bounds of when someone should be able to book an appointment with you. Google Calendar then generates an interactive webpage that you can send to recipients or put on Moodle/Email Signatures/wherever. When the other party opens your link, Google Calendar automatically checks all of the times that you’re not busy on your calendar and presents the person scheduling with a screen where they can choose a day and time.

A screenshot of the Appointment Scheduling screen showing days and times that are available. The person you're scheduling with is named "first last" with a generic profile picture, the event is called "Test Event". It's a 30 minute meeting that takes place at "The Pine Grove at Hope College" at "141 E 12th Street, Holland, MI, 49423". Below those details, there are columns representing each day, and within each column, there are buttons representing each available time. In the left sidebar, there's a small calendar to quickly jump to other weeks.
The Appointment Scheduling screen showing days and times that you are available

You can create multiple Appointment Scheduling events with different details. To get started, open your Google Calendar and click Create → Appointment schedule.

An animated GIF of a screen recording simulating creating a new Appointment Schedule. The user clicks Create → Appointment Schedule, fills in the event name as "Free consultation with Janice", notes that it's a one hour meeting, marks only some days of the week as available, and marks the location as "Google Meet". Google Calendar then presents a link to give out, and the screen recording demonstrates clicking on an available time and booking the event.
Create a new Appointment Schedule in Google Calendar, no external account needed

Option #2 — External Tools

Some of you may be familiar with Calendly, cal.com, or YouCanBook.me. These services offer a similar scheduling page option, but often have a free tier and paid tier with certain features requiring a paid subscription.

In our experience, the service that offers the most utility for free by far is cal.com. Other services charge for multiple event types, but cal.com is an open-source startup whose business model centers around charging for corporate and enterprise features. They offer their whole product for free to individual users. We highly recommend trying them out if you’re running up against the limitations of customizibility with Google Calendar Appointment Scheduling.

An animated GIF of a screen recording showing the cal.com booking interface. It's a simple, minimal design showing the event details on the left, a calendar date picker in the middle, and available times for the selected date on the right.
cal.com’s end user booking interface

These options, in addition to sharing your calendar’s free/busy with colleagues, should make Doodle polls and long scheduling email chains a thing of the past! As always, if you’re trying to accomplish something specific and would like some help, don’t hesitate to contact the CIT Help Desk (x7670). We’d be delighted to figure out a solution together!

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