Your Tech Tamer

By Sandra Clitter 　http://www.yourtechtamer.com/blog/2013/03/free-meeting-organizer-boy-does-this-save-time-and-emails/

I don’t know about you, but for me one of the most aggravating parts of the Administrative side of my business is trying to organize meetings. Who’s available when? How do I organize all of the responses? Usually, I create something in Excel that works – sort of – but it’s tedious and manual and prone to mistakes.

Enter…MeetingWizard.com. Yes, a FREE tool that allows you – very simply – to organize meetings with no back and forth on availability.

Meeting Wizard is an incredibly simple, but elegant solution to this annoying administrative task. All that you and your invitees have access to email and a browser. It’s that simple. They promise it and they deliver!

To get started, you sign up for a free account. They only ask for the basics – your name, location and email address.

To start scheduling a meeting, click on ‘Create a Meeting’ (gee, they even label things with words that everyone can understand – what a pleasure!):

I don’t know that I’d use this tool for a “specific time” meeting…I can do that right from my calendar, but I use the tool for ‘Propose one or more dates/times’. That’s the true beauty of this tool.

Select the dates/times that you’re proposing for your meeting. You just select a date/time from the drop-down, then click ‘add’. Select the duration of the meeting, the timezone and select ‘Continue’.

Tell the people something about the meeting to which you are inviting them. It’s more likely that they’ll accept if you do :-)! People don’t like going to ‘mystery’ meetings.

Review the meeting invitation before you hit the ‘send’ button. You can even send an automatic reminder to participants a day or two in advance of the meeting.

When the email goes out inviting participants to make their selections, they will get a link to Meeting Organizer. They don’t need a signon…they can just click on the link, then enter their response(s).

You’ll be able to see EVERYONE’s selections in one easy-to-review format…in fact, as meeting organizer, you can invite more people, change the meeting time, confirm the meeting, email people on the meeting list, send reminders, etc.:

All of that back-and-forth and forth-and-back is taken care of. No fuss, no muss. Meeting scheduled.

What a terrific time-saver…and you don’t just need to limit it’s use to business…how about when you’re trying to schedule dinner with a bunch of your friends, or a weekend away with family. Give it a try, it’s painless – promise!!!

(Special thanks to one of our regular readers for telling us about this tool – it’s now an invaluable part of our virtual toolbox!)