Creating the Perfect Internal Scheduling Link

At Tuple, I use scheduling links to book internal meetings alongside their more standard use for booking external meetings.

There came a point, though, where my calendar looked something like this:

This is... not great. It was hard to plan my day at a glance, and if the meeting was scheduled far enough in advance, sometimes I'd join and find myself asking "So, why did you schedule this time again?"

Luckily, we use SavvyCal, and there's a much better way to set this up!

Guest-provided titles

If we're setting up an internal link that anyone can use to grab our synchronous input, capturing what exactly they want to discuss is crucial for a few reasons:

• If you see something appear with a subject that can be tackled asynchronously, it's easier to spot and suggest the change immediately.
• When you show up to the meeting, you'll know at a glance what you're discussing.
• For the person setting up the meeting, they're forced to actually define the thing they want to discuss.

In SavvyCal, we can do this with a custom question and a custom event title.

First, open up your event's form settings in the Form Fields section of the Booking Page Options panel:

Create a new "Short Text" question, set it as "Required", and make the question something like "What are we going to chat about?". You could also be more direct with a question like "What is the desired outcome of this meeting?"

Finally, update the event title to use the answer to this question using the {{ scheduler.fields[0].value }} tag. You can find this in the Invitation Settings section of the Calendar Invitations panel.

Guest-provided references

You could stop here and enjoy clearer meetings, but adding one additional, optional question has made a huge difference for me.

Head back to the same settings, and add a new "URL" question that requests any references or prep material ahead of time. This has the same benefit of forcing preparation and advance thinking from the requester.

Here's how I set mine up:

You could be even more severe here by making the question required and tweaking the language; you'll want to customize this to match your company's meeting culture and expectations.

Conclusion

Having these questions as a part of my process for coworkers to grab time with me has had a huge impact on my day-to-day.

It makes the expectations clear for both parties, forces more preparation and thought from the scheduler, and cleanly provides the ability to tackle requests ahead of time or reroute them from meetings to asynchronous communication.