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Meeting Maker: Good Citizenship

Meeting Maker is a valuable tool, but as with much of technology, in the end, it comes down to human interaction.  Here are some suggestions that may help you communicate through Meeting Maker more effectively.

Does an invitation mean I have to attend? If the person is busy, can I still invite her/him?
The answers to these questions are the same answers they would be if you were invited, or invited someone, to a meeting using email, telephone, or any other communication device. If you are empowered to say "no" under other circumstances, you are empowered to say "no" through Meeting Maker. If your meeting proposals normally "trump" whatever else may be on someone else's calendar, send the proposal through Meeting Maker. Meeting Maker will allow you to send a meeting proposal to someone, even if the calendar has something else on it at that time, or it is outside of the person's scheduled work time (as s/he indicated through her/his Meeting Maker "user info").

Recurring meetings
When you schedule a meeting that occurs more than once using the options in the "Details" dialog box, set an end date. Please do not check the "ongoing" box. If you check "ongoing," and invite someone to the meeting who uses a handheld device (such as a Palm), the next time that person synchronizes the handheld, the handheld will complain bitterly as it tries to schedule occurrences of that meeting forever into the future. Schedule the meeting to recur for the next year, and then 9-11 months from now, schedule it for another year.

Choosing a title for your meetings
In making the change from a stand-alone to a shared calendar, it is easy to find yourself with appointment names that do not make sense in a shared environment. When you invite others to a meeting, bear in mind that the invitees cannot change the title, location, date, or agenda of that meeting. Meeting Maker considers you to be the "owner" of the meeting. Try to provide information that will be useful once the meeting is on someone else's calendar. Here are some suggestions:

• On your own calendar, you may have appointments bearing other people's names that will not make sense once you invite those people to the meetings. For example, Jane used to write "John weekly" on her calendar to indicate her weekly meeting with John. But once she invites John, John has an appointment on his calendar that bears simply his own name! Title meetings with 2 people with both participants names: Jane/John weekly.
• For meetings of 4 or more people, use the topic of the meeting for the title.  For 3 participants: use your judgement.
  
• When you invite someone outside of your group to present a topic to you, include your group's name in the meeting proposal. For example, an appointment called "HR presentation" on the calendar of an HR staff member whose been invited does not make much sense. "HR presentation for Biology" will make sense to the work group, and to the guest.
• Do not make your titles too long.  Do use the agenda field (on the "Details" tab when you "edit" the meeting) to provide more information about the meeting's purpose. You can also use agenda field for anything you might be tempted to send via email as background information.
  

Block off time for yourself
When someone tries to schedule a meeting with you, s/he will look for a time when you are available (when there is nothing on your daily calendar indicating you are busy).  As a result, it is best to schedule into Meeting Maker all of the work hours during which you are busy.

• If you are worried that you will be bombarded with meeting requests at a time when you must complete a project, block off time to work on your project so that others will know that you are busy at those times.
  
• If you know it will take 15 minutes to travel to and from a meeting, add a 15 minute appointment on either side of the meeting and call it "travel"; doing this works better than extending the time of the meeting because you can keep track of when the meeting is actually scheduled to begin and end.
• If you are going on vacation, or for any other reason will be away from the office and unavailable for meetings for a day or more, schedule that vacation, conference time, or work-at-home day on your calendar.  There are two good ways of doing this:
  
• Schedule an appointment that spans your entire work day and give it an appropriate name, like "vacation."  If it occurs during more than one day, open the Details of the appointment, choose "Occurs daily" from the "Occurs once" drop-down, and make the end date the day just before you will be back in the office.
• Create a banner for the period of time you will be away, either by making the banner span all your days away, or by making a banner for one day and then, from the Details tab, choose "Occurs daily" until the day just before you'll be back in the office.  Once you have made your banner(s), open the banner, switch to the Options tab, and click the Flexible box off so that it is empty.  Now the banner will make you busy for all of the hours of each of the days it appears.