Sending out Calendar Invite

A lot of busy people live by the calendar. I have seen a lot of older people use a yearly planner / notebook to mark things on their calendar and they make it a practice to look at it every day or even check things before the start of the week. The culture of sending out calendar invites need to be a habit. Oftentimes when students graduate from college and get into a corporate environment, it takes them a while to understand this. I have also seen this with experienced professionals. If you have a meeting, it needs to be on the calendar for the other people to remember about the meeting. 

Here are a couple of scenarios where we have often had trouble (still continue to and hence wanted to write about this):

Scenario 1: You are talking with a client or prospect and on the conversation flow you decide to meet next week. In such a scenario, one of the first things to do is to send a calendar invite via your email tool. If you do not do this, there is no way for the client to remember that there is a meeting.

Scenario 2: You are on a team call (or) sales call and during the call with the client or your team, you decide to meet next Tuesday at 11:30 am EST. (or IST or any time zone). The best practice is to send invites then and there.

Why should you send calendar invites then and there? The other person(s) you are talking with could be busy. If you do not send a calendar invite then and there his / her calendar will be blocked during the desired time. Also when you are on the call (or) right after the call it is highly likely that he is still around the computer and he will accept it.

If you do not send the calendar invite immediately (oftentimes) people take 8 hours or wait till the end of the day to send out the invite. Then they forget to send out invites and this becomes a lost opportunity.

Other notes: When you send out an invite , make sure you mark the time and the appropriate time-zone. Google provides you the option to choose the timezone. The entire world has different time-zones and you need to select the appropriate time zone.  Also, good meetings always have an agenda. Write the agenda in the description.

Simple Rules and Tricks: Always send out calendar invite. Do not wait to send out the invite. Send it immediately (either during the call (or) if you need information to work on, then send it right after the call. Otherwise you will never send it.