Scheduling 101

One of the key ways to level up your scheduling skills is to take a step back and evaluate the information being sent to you.

In this post, we are going to discuss the age-old meeting request.

As you know, these usually come in with a request for time of your executive/leader and some key people that need to attend the meeting, and if you're lucky the reason for the meeting beyond "discuss X". Sometimes more info, but usually not.

While at a glance this looks like enough information, it's really only 30%. It can give you enough to schedule, but not enough information to ensure the meeting is effective and everyone is prepared.

In order to improve your scheduling skills, you should be able to answer these questions -

Is the meeting related to another topic already on calendar or is it time-sensitive?

Are the attendees related to the topic of the meeting?

-Is someone missing?

-Are there too many people being requested?

-Are all stakeholders on the project requested?

What is the goal of the meeting?

Will there need to be additional meetings related to this topic?

If there are more than 3 executives on the attendee list:

-Are all of the executives required? If not, who is optional or a proxy is acceptable?

While at first, you might need to ask all these questions to the requester of the meeting, but over time you will be able to answer them yourself. But regardless of where you got the answers, simply having the above information elevates your ability to schedule the meeting thoughtfully and be able to look around corners and start to anticipate the needs of your executive and your team.

Let's dig into these in more depth.

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