Time is one of organization’s most precious resources and planning ahead is key to optimizing an executive’s schedule–building in flexibility for the unexpected helps to mitigate the unforeseen. And the article posted by BCG, ‘The Heart of CEO Effectiveness” shares great insights and best practices to ponder, especially for those who are faced with exhaustion at the end of each day.
I am going to dive into another piece of ‘finding time’ that is paramount to efficiency and productivity, in particular for those who are in charge of orchestrating heavy Microsoft outlook calendars. The Microsoft Garage team are always hard at work exploring options to enhance tools and/or discover new ones to maximize our performance. The latest tool I am excited to share is a Microsoft Office 365 product “FindTime”. Although everyone is open for help with finding time in their day, this tool is primarily a productivity boost for scheduling meetings. For all the executive assitants who are outlook calendar schedulers, this maybe a breakthrough in calendar management and overcoming a hurdle with coordinating external global stakeholders/meeting attendees. Sourcing for time either starts with an email or call to the executive’s administrative point of contact but if they do not have one, then the hurdle widens.
The following image is a visual of the Microsoft outlook add-in FindTime poll shared in the post “About FindTime” which also has a video that demonstrates the powerhouse behind it:
The tool will automatically schedule the meeting based on the first available time slot agreed upon but this feature can be turned off for those who prefer to send the calendar post with additional details to include the purpose of the discussion.
A ‘how to’ overview can be viewed here to learn more about the tool that helps take calendar productivity to a new level and minimize the exhaustion out of coordinating meeting times across multiple calendars.
