Setting up a Meeting: Keeping Track of Suggested Appointment Times

How many times has it happened to you? Someone replies accepting one of the dates you offered for a meeting, only for you to realise you’ve accidentally booked something else. Or you need to send out some dates for a meeting but you get that nagging feeling you offered the same time to someone else. What to do?

Put Them in the Calendar

The first thing to do is to create an appointment in your calendar for each of the date/time suggestions you have provided your contact. Mark them as ‘tentative’ in Outlook, so it’s clear that they are not definite appointments yet and you still have the opportunity to change them if you need to. Having them in the calendar means you won’t inadvertently accept another meeting during those times (unless you’re really not paying any attention at all!). Outlook will typically indicate if there is a potential conflict so you can consciously make a decision as to whether to accept a new meeting and potentially have to let your contact know that the date is no longer available.

Name Them Clearly

When you put the tentative appointments in your calendar, make sure you name them clearly so you’ll remember what they were for. Trust me, it is so easy to forget! Don’t just put something like ‘Busy’, or ‘Hold’. Give it a clear title naming the contact and the reason for the meeting. If it’s not just you going, but one or more colleagues, you may actually want to go so far as to create internal meeting invites for each of the potential appointment times—that way you’re doing your colleagues a favour as well, so none of them will inadvertently book something at a time they’re supposed to be keeping free.

If you’ve offered a date/time to more than one person for different meetings, then create a separate appointment in your calendar for each one. Yes, you’ll have overlapping appointments for a while, but that’s the whole point—you want to remind yourself that the time could potentially go several ways depending on who responds.

Put on a Reminder

Put a reminder on each of the tentative appointments, so you can remove them if a long time has elapsed since you sent out the date. After all, you can only keep those times free for your contact for so long, and you will need to offer dates to other people as well. When the reminder triggers, you can make a decision as to whether you want to remove the tentative appointment and hence free up the time for other things.

Don’t Delay

It’s worth repeating that you should immediately put in those tentative appointments when you send out your invitation email with your suggested times. Even better, do it before you send out the email. Don’t delay! You will forget about it and increase the risk of a conflict arising. Typically, you’ll be scouring your Outlook calendar anyway, looking for free timeslots to offer—as soon as you spot one, stick in the tentative appointment right away.

Check it’s Still Available

When you get the response from your contact with their preferred date/time(s), you can now confidently check whether the slot is still available or not. If there’s still a tentative appointment there, you know you’re OK. Of course, you might have deleted it as it’s been a while, but that’s OK too if the slot is free. If there’s already another appointment there, you know it’s because your contact took too long to respond so you don’t have to feel too bad about saying that slot is no longer available.

Do the Clearout

Once you’ve arranged the meeting and sent out the invite, you’ll want to clear out all the other tentative appointments you originally set up. Now, this can be a bit tedious if you need to scroll through multiple weeks in Outlook and try to spot them one by one. That’s where the clear labelling comes in again—all you need to do is use the Search function in the calendar and Outlook will bring them up for you in a list. It’s then a simple matter of selecting and deleting.

Outlook Poll Scheduling Feature

You might be wondering if all this is the sort of thing that Outlook should actually be automating! In fact, there is a Microsoft 365 feature in Outlook, called Reply with Scheduled Poll that does much of this. I think it only works with Microsoft 365 accounts, however, and I’m not sure how smoothly it handles the process. Worth checking out though. There may also be plugins that help with automating the polling process, but it’s always good to have a solid workflow that you can fall back on.