As an executive assistant, each and every day can seem like a never ending roller coaster ride. And yet a lot of executive assistants that I have interacted with have a deep sense of satisfaction knowing how critical and high-value role they play in their executive's life.

The spectrum of tasks that you as an executive assistant may have to manage on a given day may vary a lot but one important responsibility that stays constant is managing and scheduling meetings for your executive. In fact the multiple threads of email back-and-forth could sometime take up entire day. FreeBusy helps you free yourself from the mundane task of trying to avoid conflicts and schedule meetings 10x faster

Eliminate the email back-and-forth to schedule meetings

To understand how a tool like FreeBusy can help you, let us take an example where you have 4 emails from external people, 2 of whom would like to setup a 15-min phone call and 2 others who would like to setup a 30-min virtual meeting in the next 2-3 days with your executive.

As you would see, this is just a very crude outline of the workflow that would be required to handle such a common scheduling scenario.

  1. You would first check the availability of your executive over the next 2-3 days to pick a few options for each external party.
  2. To avoid conflicts, you would try to give different slots (if possible) to each external person and create HOLD events to keep a track of the same.
  3. Incase there aren't enough time slots, you may end up sharing the same options to more than one person
  4. It would inevitably result into some email back-and-forth trying to fit in each meeting and phone call. Some may even get pushed to next week instead
  5. After the time is fixed, you would have to create a calendar invite, add the link to the virtual session and share it with the participant.

The new workflow: With FreeBusy

When you and your executive use FreeBusy, it allows you to access your executive's availability from within Outlook email client and Gmail (through Outlook add-in and Gmail add-on).

So all you need to do is depending on the participant, select a 15-min or a 30-min appointment type and send the link to the participant

The participant then gets a personalized link where they can see the executive's availability in real time and pick the time that works for them. When they propose the meeting, FreeBusy automatically adds it to the executive's calendar and sends out the invite.

Moreover, if the web conferencing service is integrated, FreeBusy can even talk to the web conferencing tool on behalf of the executive and add the link for a virtual session in the calendar event automatically.

There is no email back-and-forth and it frees you up from a lot of the manual tasks so that you can focus more on other responsibilities to help your executive.

Sounds too good to be true? Give it a try yourself!