meetingwizard.com

I have to thank Denise Koufogiannakis at the University of Alberta Libraries for introducing me to Meeting Wizard. Meeting Wizard is one of those productivity tools that you can’t live without once you’ve used it and Denise was quite subtle with exposing myself and other members of our COPPUL LOCKKS project to this productivity tool.

It seems like it should be a simple thing to book future meetings with people.  It may be easy enough within your own institution, providing everyone uses the same corporate calendaring system and keeps their calendar up-to-date.  However, negotiating the next meeting time with people outside your institution can definitely be a challenge and can often extend meeting times quite a bit as people may not be able to readily access their calendar and many others can sometimes get into long-winded discussions about how busy they are (for more on the latter, see Librarianship and the Culture of Busy by Ryan and Koufogiannakis).

So Meeting Wizard is one of those tools that has a simple function and should find a natural fit without having to really explain it or having to overhype or promote its usefulness.  It’s just a matter of proposing dates and times and reviewing responses and guaging the best fit for availability for confirming the next meeting.  Everything is negotiated online with a Web interface and email messages and no download is required (only the person proposing a meeting is required to register and setup a free account on Meeting Wizard).  Once you try it, you’ll find scheduling meetings has never been so painless and future meetings can either be more focused on the issues that should really matter and/or can be shortened quite a bit (and neither of those is a bad thing).