When thinking about technology, it’s funny how sometimes things that are extremely simple to do in person become this huge, lengthy process when done through technology. Email is often the culprit. For one, it makes planning a meeting unnecessarily difficult. It’s pretty easy to set aside a date when discussing face-to-face with other people. I think we can all agree on that.
So why should it take you several emails to find the right time to schedule a meeting or a call with someone you work with/for, or a prospect?
Tough question, right? I’ve been frustrated with the whole process in quite a few occasions, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. Just talking to Solid users made me realize that we all have our preferences as meeting planners. So I looked at the apps and tools that could help me plan my meetings.
6 Meeting Planner apps and tools that will save you time
Sunrise Meet: for 1-on-1 meetings, better on mobile
You know Sunrise as the beautiful calendar app no big company wanted to build. So it grew into this hugely popular app that consequently was bought by Microsoft. Sunrise’s latest addition is Meet, offering a quick way to plan 1-on-1 meetings.
Meet is especially elegant on mobile users as it integrates your calendar as a keyboard. This makes it easy to pick times while inside any messaging app. Once you’ve picked times that work, your contact will only have to choose one of your propositions to schedule the meeting on both calendars.
Check out our interview with Alice from the Sunrise team! Update: Sunrise just announced they’ll be integrated with Outlook. Perhaps the meet feature will make it into the Microsoft suite then? We can hope.
Mixmax: Schedule via email
Mixmax is a Chrome extension that adds loads of useful functionalities to gmail. Tracking email views, saving templates to share with your team… the list goes on. One thing that’ll make you fall in love with Mixmax is its group scheduling feature. Never resort to a back-and-forth of emails to find a date anymore. Mixmax lets you embed a list of time slots to your emails for recipients to choose from.
This effectively reduces to 1 the number of emails exchanged to schedule a 1-on-1, and greatly facilitates voting for the best time in case of group meetings. If you’ve ever used Doodle, it’s like that, but embedded in your email.
Check out our interview with Olof, founder of Mixmax!
Alternative: Assistant.to also works within your email and allows you to share availability in a few clicks. It syncs with web conferencing tools such as join.me and gotomeeting which, you know, can’t hurt.
Meekan: The Slack bot that schedules meetings for you
See this screenshot? It shows exactly just how easy it is to schedule meetings. It looks at available times in your calendar both for you and invitees, kindly suggests a few suggestions, and lets you vote for the best one.
And you know what they say: “if you feel weird talking to a Slack bot, that’s because you didn’t do it enough just yet!”
Psst! We’ve heard there was a Meekan bot for Hipchat as well…
Check out our interview with Meekan to learn more about their vision and the product.
Acuity Scheduling: Fully fledged service to make planning meetings easy
If you’re reading this article, maybe you’ve had enough with booking meetings all together. Perhaps what you’re looking for is a fully fledged software that’ll handle it for you. If that’s the case, Acuity Scheduling is what you’re looking for. Many Solid users are trusting Acuity to book their meetings for them and effectively automate all the process of the meeting.
Handy websites to plan meetings
Worldtimebuddy.com
Ever tried to set up a time for a call with someone on another timezone? Exchanges can get pretty hectic and unclear. Worldtimebuddy lets you add timezones, set up the meeting time, and share
Doodle.com
As we mentioned before, Doodle is a must-know tool to schedule events for several people. A “doodle” can be set up in a matter of seconds and then shared via a single URL with invitees so they can RSVP. A pretty good solution when you don’t have access to everyone’s calendars and availabilities.
For more advance uses and interesting automations, they have an API available.
That’s our roundup for the day. Anything other tool we should’ve added to the list? Let us know, we’d be glad to try it. Try Solid: the easiest solution for productive meetings.