When it comes to calendar scheduling, you deserve the best
At Cal.com, we know how time-consuming scheduling can be, especially when you don't have the right tools. That's why we built Cal.com. We wanted to make sure that no matter what industry you work in, where you are located, or what your level of technical comfort is, there is an option on the market that offers free, robust, flexible, and customizable calendar scheduling.
Five tips to maximize your Cal.com experience
As you get started on your time mastery journey, there are things that you can do to improve and increase the pace at which you see improvements in your workflow when using Cal.com. In this article, we're going to talk about five scheduling tips that, if implemented, will help to ensure that Cal.com doesn't just save you time, but also better reflects the way you work and your unique needs.
These tips are simple and effective features that are part of Cal.com. You don't have to have any technical background in order to take advantage of them. All Cal.com customers, regardless of whether they have our free base account or subscribe to a team or organization plan, have access to these features.
Tip 1: customize your booking questions
All Cal.com users have the ability to customize their booking questions, but it's not something that everyone does. Your booking questions are the simple forms that people see when they click on a time slot. It's where they're asked about their name, phone number, email, and all that sort of stuff.
You can customize those booking questions to further reflect the information that you need ahead of time in order to properly prepare for an appointment. For example, let's say you're a caterer.
You could add custom questions like:
Do you have any known food allergies or sensitivities?
Are there any ingredients or flavors that need to be avoided?
Do you have a favorite style of cuisine, for example, French or Americana?
Asking these sorts of custom questions will help you start saving time immediately. The reason why they make such an impactful difference is because booking questions start the process of effective communication before the meeting even happens. This makes it easier to prepare for your appointments in advance and helps to ensure that the actual event in question proceeds smoothly.
Who else can benefit from booking questions?
Booking questions are also great for people working in fields related to health. Great questions for health-centered professionals and organizations include:
Have you visited our clinic before?
What type of insurance do you have?
Is this your first time seeking support for this specific issue?
As you can see, asking industry-specific booking questions is a simple way to eliminate awkwardness before it even occurs and to speed up client-centered knowledge acquisition. This is great for everyone because it means that all parties have shared and received the information that's needed to set the meeting up for success.
Tip 2: take advantage of booking limits
All Cal.com users have access to a wide range of event-level booking limits. This lets you control how often an event occurs, whether or not you can be booked for this event back-to-back without a break in between, and all these sorts of things. Taking advantage of these booking limits means that you can ensure that you always have the breathing room you need in order to show up, be there, and perform in a manner that meets your own exacting standards.
Cal.com's booking limits include settings like:
Buffer time
Total booking duration
Minimum notice
Time-slot interval
Using booking limits is an easy way to set yourself up for success. It only takes a few moments to customize them via your event-level settings. Booking limits are especially useful for individuals in professions such as counseling, law, and medicine who engage in pro bono work. Using booking limits makes it easier to track and manage charitable commitments without having to invest in additional time management or scheduling software.
Tip 3: make your bookings opt-in with "requires confirmation"
Opt-in bookings are fantastic. They guarantee that requested appointments won't be booked without your explicit approval. The last thing any busy person needs is a last-minute surprise, and if you don't enable this setting, that can happen, especially if you haven't customized your booking limits.
The requires confirmation setting helps to simplify things by making sure that you receive an email as well as a notice in the bookings area of your dashboard, letting you know whenever someone wants to meet. These bookings won't be finalized until you click a button approving them.
This is a setting that has to be enabled on a per-event basis, so if you've only set it up for one meeting type, you don't have to worry about it impacting anything else.
This means that you can mix and match different control systems with different bookable events based on your needs.
Tip 4: don't be afraid of hidden events
You don't have to make all of your booking links public. Hidden events let you create specific meetings and appointment types that you can share on a need-to-know basis. A great example of this is if you're working in an organization, company, or environment that encourages mentorship. You aren't necessarily going to want to mentor every new hire or intern that walks through the door.
However, there will be people whose talent, personality, and approach to work inspire you. Because of this, you might find that you want to help them on their professional journey.
You can use hidden events to make a hidden mentorship appointment type that you could share with your chosen apprentices to help them as they develop their career. You can also use hidden events for simple things like scheduling a quick chat with co-workers you're close to or creating a meeting type so that your supervisors can book time with you in an emergency even if you're out of the office.
Tip 5: utilize Cal.com's workflow features
Our final tip is to not be afraid of using Cal.com's workflow features. Workflows are amazing. They will save you so much trouble and grief. The way workflows operate is simple. You create one, you choose a trigger, and then you choose actions.
For example, you can set things up so that you're sent an email (and it can be to your personal email; it doesn't have to be to your work email) every time an appointment is canceled. You can also set it up so that you receive a notification whenever an appointment is rescheduled. You don't have to use only one workflow per event type. You can use as many workflows as you need to ensure that you don't have to think about what's happening. You just know what's going on, especially in regards to your time.
The more you use Cal.com, the more you're going to discover all the ways in which it takes the stress out of managing scheduling and appointments. If you liked this article and you want to learn more about other Cal.com product features, just click here. We have a whole section devoted to that on our blog. Thanks for reading, and as always, happy scheduling!
