Remote Work

A cat-herder’s guide to booking remote meetings

Saddle up, because we’re going to tell you how to set up remote meetings around conflicting schedules and different time zones.


Cowboys riding the range, driving over a hundred head of cats through tumbleweeds and riverbeds … yes cats. You may remember the “herding cats” superbowl commercial by EDS 20 years ago, and if you don’t, it’s well worth watching - because if your job involves booking remote meetings, you’ll know exactly how those cat-herders feel.


If you’ve never met a cat, or a cowboy, let me extend this metaphor a little further. Cats like to go their own way, in their own time. They’re hard to catch and nearly impossible to pin down. Much like your average coworker, and exactly like most people in management.

But you have a remote meeting to book. So saddle up, because we’re going to tell you how to set up remote meetings around conflicting schedules and different time zones so you can get full attendance.

 

1. You need the right tool to bring people together

The worst part of scheduling meetings with multiple attendees is the back-and-forth of asking “when are you available?” This gets exponentially harder the more attendees you have. Sure, there are survey, polling and voting tools where everyone can fill out the times that work for them, but the more people involved, the harder it is to get 100% agreement. With remote work being the norm having the right scheduling tool is important.

But what if you could see everyone’s calendar availability all at the same time - and be able to immediately identify the times when everyone is available, across time zones, no matter whether they use Google Calendar or Microsoft (or both)?

Taggg is designed to do exactly that with calendar overlays that let you cross-check availability at a glance and book your meetings instantly.

It’s like having a lasso that can’t miss.

2. You need a smarter calendar to protect your time

Most professionals block out their calendars to prevent meetings and calls from sneaking in to disrupt their workflow. But sometimes, you don’t want to block *everyone* from scheduling a meeting - just those people. We all know who those people are.

Most calendars aren’t set up to show different available times for different people or groups, but Taggg understands that ‘available’ doesn’t have to mean ‘available’ to anyone. With Taggg, you can create sets of availability for specific use cases that you can assign to a group, individual, or a specific meeting link. If you’ve ever wished you had your own personal secretary to field calls, let the important ones through, and tell the rest you just left for lunch — this one’s for you.

3. Your range covers multiple territories and time zones - your calendar should too

This makes it much easier to schedule meetings with team members, clients and prospects across multiple time zones too.

If you’ve ever left a 6am gap in your calendar so a specific European client could book that time during their business hours — only to have Jo from accounting book it instead — you’ll understand this pain.

With Taggg’s global availability feature, you can create an “Early Morning Availability” for contacts in other time zones when you want to open your availability earlier than normal, but only for certain people. You can also create availability for certain types of meetings and events, like booking more consultation calls or demos, which can overwrite your Default Availability.

Okay, okay, people aren’t cats, but they sure are hard to corral

We know the limits of a metaphor, so we won’t push it. The bottom line is that people are busy and protective of their time. But that doesn’t mean you can’t bring everyone together, and with Taggg, it doesn’t even have to be hard. We’re here to make scheduling remote meetings easier, cutting out the back-and-forth, so you can get to the real work faster.

 


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