This approach doesn’t have to only apply to corporate employees — it can apply to web workers as well. Whether you’re a freelancer or a corporate employee, if your work is measured on your performance rather than your presence, your work hours may be flexible enough to accommodate your own “20-Percent Time.”

But why do it in the first place?

• Innovation and creativity. Innovation is one of the most cited perks of 20-percent time. According to this handy infographic, half of Google’s products are a result of this employment perk. The products that have resulted from 20-Percent Time include Google Adsense and many Google Labs features. An example that might seem closer to home is cartoonist Hugh MacLeod. He drew his first gapingvoid cartoons during his downtime while he was working as a copywriter. Now he’s published a book and does commissioned art. He may not have had a firm policy on creating things outside of work, but it’s easy to lose sight of side projects when one focuses on their “real” work almost every waking hour to the exclusion of everything else.
• Exploration. By making the time to pursue personal passions, you can dabble in different areas, which sometimes results a broader understanding or a new perspective on the field you’re working in. It might even lead to a new line of work altogether. 37signals started as a web design firm, but couldn’t find collaboration tools suited to their needs so they created Basecamp. This led them to develop their own web apps instead, eventually leading to the Ruby on Rails framework.
• Opportunity. By making time for personal projects you give yourself license to act on ideas, questions and passions that you might not be able to do during your work week. You’ll have a chance to do tasks would’ve been too risky, or even seemed downright strange.
• Motivation. In a popular TED talk, Dan Pink discussed the science behind three major motivators in the workplace (which I elaborated on in a previous post). These motivators are autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Though your experience with the latter two may depend on the project you choose, giving yourself 20-Percent Time allows you to exercise your autonomy.

Setting Your 20-Percent Time

Before you schedule your 20-Percent Time, remember that the number shouldn’t be taken literally. Allocate the time that works for you. You can take one day each week, an entire weekend, or even 30 minutes each day. Personally, I like to start my day working on a personal passion project. It gives me fuel to work through the rest of the day. Plus, it eases me into a heavier workload ahead — after all, if I make a mistake on my personal project, none of my clients will suffer.

As Simon noted in a previous post, it’s easier to get burned out when you don’t work a typical 9-to-5 job. With that in mind, how can the typical web worker manage to have 20-Percent Time especially if they have a busy home life? It’s hard to squeeze in a personal project if your family, pets, and home errands suddenly require your attention.

Taking a cue from Sylvia Plath, why not work on your project before your household wakes up? This might mean waking up earlier than usual, but even 15 minutes per day spent on a passion project is better than nothing. Plus, the quiet environment might make it easier for you to work.

But here’s some more common sense: mark the end of your workday. It may not be a cutting-edge life hack, but it’s simple and, more importantly, it’s true. Only by setting actual work hours can we draw a clear line between work and the rest of our preoccupations.

Do you set aside time for personal projects? If so, how did you manage it and what do you do with your time?

Photo by flickr user net_efekt, licensed under CC-BY-2.0

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We all have different ways of working based on our body clocks and personal preferences. I get my best work done between 7am and 2pm. I usually try to get up between 6am and 7am, and head right to the computer to catch up on East Coast client email and take care of any urgent items before hitting the shower and starting my day.

Between 7am and 2pm, I work mostly on client projects and writing. I also schedule many of my client meetings during this time and most of my posts for this blog are written in the morning and early afternoon. I try to schedule non-billable meetings after 2pm, so most of my business development or informational meetings are scheduled in the late afternoon. I also try to schedule my workouts in the late afternoon / early evening when my productivity is waning, as I need something to re-energize me.

I also try to combine meetings where possible to avoid spending too much time in transit getting from one meeting to the next. My favorite way to do this is to combine meetings with a Friday afternoon event in Portland called Beer and Blog. By Friday afternoon, I am usually less focused when sitting at home trying to get work done, so I try to schedule meetings right before Beer and Blog. This gets me out of the house, gets the energy level back up, and reduces travel time by bringing my meetings to the same location as an event that I plan to attend anyway.

This doesn’t mean that I am completely inflexible when it comes to scheduling. I sometimes end up doing client work in the afternoon or evening to meet a deadline, and I often end up with random non-work coffee meetings with people in the morning to accommodate busy schedules. I can be flexible, but I certainly have my preferences for certain types of work at specific times.

Until last week, I didn’t realize how big of an impact my schedule had on my productivity. In Portland, we were having a heat wave with temperatures in the 90s all week, which meant that my afternoon workouts were nearly impossible, so I shifted my workouts into the morning and my client work into the late afternoon. While I was able to beat the heat and get my workouts finished before the temperature hit 80 degrees, I found it much more difficult to finish my client work. I was able to get everything finished, but I was more easily distracted in the afternoons, and I missed having the workout as a way to get my energy levels back up. We’re having another heat wave this week, but now that I am more aware of how my productivity is impacted by my schedule, maybe I can make a few more tweaks that result in less of an impact to my productivity.

How do you schedule your time? How does your schedule impact your productivity?

If I believed the hype from all of these scheduling services, I’d have to assume that we were all just careening around haphazardly, making and breaking so many appointments and meetings that we lose all sense of time and date. In practice, I think that most of the time the most scheduling software I need is my iPhone and its built-in Calendar application. That said, there are definitely times when scheduling using Google Calendar, which I already use for group-related activities, would make more sense.

Using ScheduleOnce’s Google Calendar Firefox Add-on, that’s exactly what you can do. Just install the add-on via the ScheduleOnce web site, restart your browser, and then log into your Google Calendar to get started. From there, you can use the ScheduleOnce control panel in your sidebar to pick Tentative Availability times which are then optionally connected back to your Google Calendar. Once you’ve chosen your available times, ScheduleOnce generates a link that you can email to other potential attendees so that they can choose from the times you suggest.

Once invitees reply, you’ll be notified in the ScheduleOnce sidebar window. You’ll also receive a notification email from the web app with a direct link to allow you to view what times your invitee has chosen. When you click on it, you’ll be presented with a view of which times overlap, as indicated by a green block on ScheduleOnce’s daily agenda display. Connecting to your Google Calendar, selecting a time, and clicking “Schedule Meeting” will confirm the chosen slot and send a notification to all attendees. It’ll also add the event to your Google Calendar and those of your fellow attendees, so long as you all have the ScheduleOnce add-on installed.

It doesn’t sound complicated, and it isn’t in theory, but in practice I had to do a whole lot more reloading and reauthorizing than I should’ve probably been required to do. Whether this is a problem with the way ScheduleOnce is written, or with the Google Calendar developer API, I couldn’t say. All I know is that I found myself thinking somewhat wistfully back to the days of When is Good, when times were simpler. But if you absolutely abhor manually entering things into your Google Calendar, give ScheduleOnce a try. It is free, which definitely helps make up for its little quirks.

Do you use scheduling software, or, like me, do you prefer to do things manually?

BookFresh’s online service isn’t so different from a virtual receptionist. As you set up your account, you have the opportunity to choose what kinds of appointments you’ll accept: as a web worker with clients all over, I primarily offer only phone appointments. If you’re willing to have clients come to your business, or you’re willing to go to visit them, however, you can choose those options. You can also schedule a client without having him go through setting up an appointment himself, as well as limit the hours you are available on your calendar.

As you explore BookFresh, you’ll find many features beyond simply setting appointments. The site can issue a variety of appointment reminders, including via text message to make sure you get them. You can also sync the service with your existing calendar. If you charge directly for the time you spend meeting with a client, you can also have BookFresh offer a pre-payment option to your clients; the site uses PayPal to request and accept payments. You can even embed your appointment schedule in your own web site.

If you work in a team,  the scheduler can handle multiple staff members on both the Business plan ($19.95 per month) and the Business Pro plan ($29.95). The crucial difference between the two plans is the availability of phone support. A free plan is available if you’re interested in testing out BookFresh, but it is severely limited.

In addition to the scheduling services, BookFresh offers a few additional features meant to help you find more leads. The site allows you to integrate client testimonials into your schedule, as well as create a business mini-site in order to better attract clients. It also provides advertising services to drum up local business for your company through Google, Vast and other sites. I wouldn’t necessarily consider such an advertising strategy to be useful for many web workers, considering not all of us look primarily for local business, but the feature doesn’t seem to have any additional costs associated with it.

What tools do you use for setting up client meetings?

The key to a successful working holiday? Good time management and prioritization skills. Having fun and distracting things, settings and activities all around you has a way of throwing what needs doing and what can be put off into sharp relief. The result, for me at least, is a kind of highly motivated tunnel vision that has me blowing through high-priority tasks in half the time I would normally take.

Since you’re not actually always on vacation, how do you replicate the effect in order to trigger task triage? The solution is to bring back the motivation, if not the exotic locales.

Fill Your Day With Extra-Curricular Activities

When planning out your work week, add in as many fun, after-work activities as you can manage. This might mean some personal blogging, joining a book club that meets regularly, participating in regular Twitter chat groups, or playing recreational league sports (I’ve just signed up for dodgeball, which should be interesting).

Not only will crowding weekdays with fun, social or active events and activities cut down on artificial work task exaggeration (you know that it shouldn’t take you three hours to finish that weekly status report, for instance), it’ll help you stay happy and healthy, too.

Knock Off Early

Take your usual workday end-time, and subtract two hours from that. No matter what the status of your work at that time (emergency priority stuff obviously excluded), you’re forbidden from doing anything else, professionally speaking. If all goes well, the perception of being under a time crunch will result in faster, more efficient work habits, and you’ll have no choice but to leave the less important stuff for another day.

Plan Day Trips

If an imaginary time crunch alone isn’t doing it for you, try peppering your week with mini-vacations. These could be things as simple as a shopping trip, or as complicated as a late afternoon jaunt to the zoo with the kids.

My own personal favorite mini-vacation is a trip to the Royal Ontario Museum here in Toronto, where the best time to visit is early in the morning to midday on weekdays, since you get to avoid the tourist crowd. I’m only halfway through the ancient Greek pottery exhibit, so it’s sure to motivate me to stay focused on the essential in order to give myself some extra leisure time.

Welcome (and Plan for) Personal Life Interruptions

If you have a home office, this might be something that’s unavoidable anyway, but blocking off a good chunk of floating time for unscheduled interruptions from your family and friends is not only a wise work/life balance move, but could help quiet professional distractions.

By giving domestic concerns a higher priority on your to-do list, you’ll have to create room by bumping low-priority work tasks, which will hopefully result in having less to think about during those hours when you are in dedicated work mode.

Working should never feel like a chore, even when you’re not treating it like a vacation, but these tips might help stave off the inevitable creep of bad habits, procrastination, boredom and, worst of all, unmanageable multitasking, which we sometimes fall into just for the sake of feeling busy. Filling your schedule with leisure activities gives you the benefit of feeling busy without having to generate extra work for yourself. It also helps give you an excuse to ignore low-priority distractions and keep a sharp focus on the important things. Plus, who doesn’t love a working vacation?

Share your singletasking tips in the comments.

Image by flickr user m o d e

Kukoo is a web app that’s specifically geared at helping you maintain what many would argue are healthier email practices. I found that emails were far less pressing than I thought they were when I used it to limit myself to checking, replying and generally managing my accounts only twice during the day.

Kukoo works by setting you up with a custom email address based on your existing one. Emails sent to that address are governed by rules of your choosing, and senders are notified according to these rules about when to expect a reply. As a sender, you get more piece of mind because you don’t have to wonder whether or not you’re being ignored. On the receiving end, you’re free to let things pile up a little bit without worrying about whether clients are getting impatient, and the pressure of replying will be somewhat alleviated. And if you feel like giving senders more info regarding your inbox habits, you can even include information regarding when you last checked your email.

There’s always a catch. In Kukoo’s case, it’s that anyone sending you emails has to add “.kukoo.com” to your existing email address in order to receive your auto-reply notifications. That’s a problem, because people are creatures of habit and as such, won’t change their address books. They’ll also figure out that emailing directly to your address bypasses the auto-reply function. Finally, if you’re concerned about branding, having “yourdomain.kukoo.com” as your go-to address might, er, water down your image somewhat.

If you aren’t able to stomach the idea of leaving senders hanging while you scramble to get a million more urgent things done before you reply to them, Kukoo might be the answer for you. If you haven’t been able to give singletasking a proper go, this could be the app to get you started.

I can always tell when I’m just putting out fires (moving from one “urgent urgency” to the next).

“What? A client needs help with an über-pressing concern, and it has to be handled right now or his web site will explode? I’ll get on that right away!”

“What, Ms. Prospective Client, you have the ultimate web project, but you need a quote within the hour? No problem.”

It always starts with checking email first thing in the morning. Open, read, react, and an hour later, reply. Open, read, react, and an hour later, reply. On and on it goes, until it’s two o’clock and not one smidgen of paid work has been done, or if it has, it’s been done in a haphazard way, usually at the client’s demand instead of using my own tried-and-true schedule and system. By the end of the day, I’m zapped and feel like a heel for allowing my work to control me, instead of the other way around. There has to be a better way!

Think of those all-too-rare productive days that fall at the opposite end of the spectrum. You pick up with your “Start Here” task. (You know, that’s when you stop midway through a project or task, and you leave yourself a note to “start here” tomorrow.) No email, no interruptions, no coffee breaks — you get right to work, stop a couple of hours later, and mark that task off your “To Be Done Today” list. Then you give yourself 15 minutes to check and reply to any important emails (quote requests, referrals from clients). Fifteen minutes later, it’s back to work. You check your list, pick the next most important task, and jump right in.

By two o’clock, you’re done. All lead generation is complete, you’ve finished your target amount of paid work, and you’re free to…do nothing, do anything!

So, how do you end the cycle of firefighting and have more of those productive days?

Use “start here” markers.

For every open project, you should have a “start here” note that tells you (specifically) where to pick up with the work (example, “Next up — map domain and set up email”). That way, when you pick up the project, you don’t have to think about where to begin.

End each day with a “To Be Done Today” list for the upcoming day.

Note the projects that need your attention, in order of priority, as well as any other important to-dos. Note or put stars next to the three most important tasks so that you’ll quickly zoom in on what should be done first.

Have “assigned days” to tackle recurring tasks.

For me, Monday is for firefighting, since a lot of things tend to pile up over the weekend. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday are heavy on lead generation, and Friday is for wrap-up (tying up loose ends in the hope of fire-proofing Monday).

The main thing is to be pro-active. Start off each day with a purpose and a plan so that you’re more productive and, in the end, more profitable.

What steps do you take to try to balance your work week? How can you go about lessening the number of fires that you have to put out on a regular basis?

Image by flickr user samantha celera

Whether it’s a do-it-yourself renovation of your home office, a one-month trip, or participating in NaNoWriMo, there’s always the big, personal project that you’re trying to fit in your schedule. How do you make sure that it won’t have much of a negative impact on your work?

Evaluate Your Situation

There are several issues you need to address before you rearrange your schedule around your personal project. To start with, ask yourself the following questions:

Which projects will be affected the most? Some projects consume your time and effort more than others. Identify the clients or the tasks which will be most affected by the changes in your schedule. The best way to do this is to audit a typical workday and see which tasks you accomplish and how long it takes to finish them.

It’s also important to note how they will be affected. Will you have less time for live support? Will there be connectivity issues that will prevent you from uploading and downloading large files?

How will the work get done? Are you going to do all the work yourself or will you require assistance? Whenever I’d take more than a week off, I always do as much work as I can beforehand, so that only daily tasks such as checking and responding to email are affected.

Still, no matter how much work you try to finish ahead of time, new tasks will always accumulate and someone has to do them. Subcontractors or assistants can be helpful — but only if you hire and train them well. There are many things that can go wrong with such an arrangement, especially if it’s your first time to work this way. To ensure that your relationship with hired help will go smoothly, plan for a transition or trial phase and start working with them before you make any real changes to your schedule. What is the best way for clients and colleagues contact you? While you’re working on your personal project, will your clients have to change the way they contact you? Let them know the best way to reach you in case of emergencies that can’t be easily discussed via email.

Develop a Contingency Plan We’ve discussed contingency plans here at WWD before. If having contingency plans is important during regular workdays, they are even more important when you’re making changes to your schedule. After all, you might not be around when problems occur. Here are some problem areas you should plan for:

• Internet connectivity
• Hardware and software failures
• Data backup
• Revision requests and new orders from clients
• Complaints, questions and other support issues

Let Everyone Know

After planning the adjustments you need to make, you have to decide whether you’ll let relevant parties know about the changes. Sometimes, personal projects hardly make a difference in your schedule or work process. But if they will, your clients might need to know about it.

While you may have clients that are supportive and understanding, there will also be those who will worry and think you are abandoning them. Think about each client’s attitude to risk and changes before spilling all the details. As long as you don’t sacrifice the work quality or your adherence to deadlines, they shouldn’t have anything to worry about.

Once in awhile, it’s good to take advantage of the flexibility that our teleworking schedules have to offer. With careful planning, we can strike a good balance between both paid and personal projects.

Have you altered your work schedule for a trip or a personal project? Share your tips in the comments.

Image by shadowkill from sxc.hu

Here’s a screencast showing MeetingMade being used to set up a meeting:

WWD Screencast: MeetingMade from WebWorkerDaily on Vimeo.

The interface is very easy to use, which is important in a tool like this as there’s no point in sending out a meeting request using a scheduling tool only to get an email back when the recipient can’t figure out how to use it. Only the meeting organizer neds to have a MeetingMade account.

MeetingMade also distinguishes itself from the crowd of meeting scheduling apps by being able to handle partial availability and timezones. MeetingMade uses the iCalendar email standard so meeting requests from the app will work with most calendaring apps like Microsft Outlook, Google Calendar  and Apple iCal.

MeetingMade is free to use while it’s in beta (it will move to paid subscription at some point in the future), and is worth checking out if you’re looking for a meeting scheduler.

What meeting scheduling tool do you use?

Part of the beauty of When is Good is its absolute simplicity. At no point do you have to even register for an account, which is great because I’ve registered for so many sites that I lost track of them long ago. In fact, at this point, lack of registration alone is a feature I look for in a web app. On the other hand, if you are the registering type, you can create an account to track your events and meetings history.

All you really need to do to access When is Good’s main functionality is click the “Get Started” button on the web site’s homepage. From there, you’ll be taken to a default calendar with the next 21 days displayed, with each day broken down into 1-hour blocks  from 6 AM to 8 PM. All of this is customizable, including the number of days displayed, as well as which times and which days of the week are shown. For those of us working with multiple timezones, you can check the “Use timezones” box, and everyone can work in their own local time.

Once the grid is set up to your liking, you simply click on times that you would like to schedule the event, type in a name for the event in the field designated for that purpose, and click “Create Event.” Write down or copy the code displayed on the next page, and then you’ll be given a link that you can send to people you want to attend. They can then mark which of the times you’ve selected is good for them. You can opt to be notified of responses by email, or just periodically visit the public link provided  to see what time invitees are choosing.

You can also edit the event using another customized URL provided by the site. And, if you’re feeling really fancy, When is Good offers the ability to sync your event with an iCal file or URL. Not a bad list of features for a free service that requires no sign-up or sharing of personal information.

Obviously, this service is better for smaller events, since it could quickly become unwieldy with a long list of invitees, but there’s not limit to the type of event to which it could apply. A business meeting, a meeting with clients, teleconference, sales call, promotional event, tweetup or party would all benefit from When is Good’s help, and best of all, if your invitees can use email and a browser, they can use this app.

Have any good tips for scheduling meetings? Share them in the comments!

Many artists and writers have their own rituals before working.  Carson McCullers reportedly made sure to wear her lucky sweater before writing, while W. Somerset Maugham would read Voltaire’s Candide.  Henry James has a longer ritual that starts at breakfast and ends after lunch, with occasional interruptions in the afternoon.  Despite half his day devoted to these rituals, James penned 23 novels during his career, plus several other shorter works.

Whether you clean your office or have a more elaborate routine, pre-work rituals are an essential part of your workday. Here are some ways in which they help:

• Builds your mindset. You might not be aware of it, but pre-work rituals can help you establish your work rhythms for the rest of the day.
• Keeps you energized. Before you start work, whether your workday has just begun or you’re returning from a short break, it’s important to have rituals that will energize you and allow you to regroup after grueling mental gymnastics.
• Shifts your perspective. This is especially true for the things you do during breaks.  For me, I find that walking my dog or working on a carpentry project for a brief period allows me to stop my train of thought and focus on something else.  After I’m done with that, I go back to my work with a fresh perspective and approach it in unexpected ways.

But what if the hours you spend on your rituals really take away from your productivity?

Find your ideal working hours. Before you tighten up your schedule, you need to define your ideal working hours first.  This is the span of time where you produce the most amount of work in the least amount of time.  For some reason, you just feel as if you’re more focused and creative during this time.  The reason why you work better might be the weather, the lack of distractions, your body clock – it doesn’t matter.  Find those hours, make sure you factor them into your schedule, and guard those hours with your life.

Once you’ve defined your ideal work hours, it’s time to cut back on your “ritual time,” if you really think that you should be spending time on your work, with your family, or on other projects.  The most important thing is to decrease the time spent on these rituals gradually, over 1 or 2 months, rather than quitting cold turkey.

Let’s say your pre-work ritual currently starts with an hour of walking, a half-hour preparing breakfast, and another two hours of leisurely reading.  Look at all those activities and see which ones are the most essential to you, and which ones you can reduce without hurting your creativity or productivity.  If you feel you’d rather spend less time reading, you can lessen your reading hours to an hour and 45 minutes for one week, then reducing 15 minutes each week until you reach your target time.  You can always make up the lost reading time after work.  Or, if you also feel like you can spend less time making breakfast, find a way to at least prepare part of it the night before.

Your pre-work rituals should be there to allow more creativity into your life and enhance the way you work.  They are, after all, one of the perks of web working.  In a traditional office setup, most employees probably don’t get to customize their schedules and activities the way web workers can.  Take advantage of your ability to do this.

What is your pre-work routine?  How does it affect your work?

Image by Luis Alves from sxc.hu

If you haven’t found satisfaction with any of the productivity tricks you’ve tried, it’s possible that you’re mistaking some of the myths for facts.  These myths could come from something you’ve read, or they could be your own preconceived notions.  To get productive, you need to get rid of these myths.

What are they and how do you debunk them?

There is one system to rule them all.

Once you get into David Allen’s Getting Things Done, or other similar productivity systems, it doesn’t mean you have to stick to its rules permanently.  There is no perfect system that’s already pre-made for you.  You need a bit of time, as well as trial and error, to find something that works.

Organized = Neat

If your office is neat, does it mean that it’s organized?  If your office looks messy, should you clean it up?  Before we start criticizing ourselves for not being neat enough, we need to get our semantics straight.

Neatness or cleanliness is more of an aesthetic value.  Organization, on the other hand, is more about how things function.  For example, if you have a stack of folders and all those folders are aligned on top of a dust-free desk, that’s neatness.  The stack of folders are only organized if they are arranged in a way that makes each folder easy to access.  So even if the desk is dusty and the folders aren’t perfectly aligned on top of each other, as long as they’re arranged in a way that makes sense to you (chronologically or alphabetically), then they are organized.

If you’re the type of person who has a messy office and hates it when someone comes in to “clean it up”, you know what I’m talking about.  Just because things don’t look orderly or like they were arranged by a robot, it doesn’t mean you’re not organized.  If you can find anything in your office within 2 seconds, you’re doing great – whether you’re neat or not.

The more tools you have, the better.

With all the number of Web 2.0 tools out there, and the number of web workers eager to try out each tool that comes along, it’s a surprise that we get any work done.

As for me, I prefer to stick to the least number of tools, and I try to avoid daily usage if it isn’t necessary. Tools should be there to help you out, not suck up your time and attention, which, of course, is better spent on other things.

Your schedule should be tight.

As someone who focuses mostly on creative work, I’ve realized that both routine and randomness have their place in your schedule.  My partner used to be very specific about my schedule.  She even created a spreadsheet that listed what I was supposed to be doing every hour.  When I told her I wanted some randomness, she blocked out a few hours in the weekend and labeled them “Randomness”.  Not quite what I meant.

The one thing that should be absolutely rigid and non-negotiable are your peak working hours.  These are the hours of the day when you are most productive and creative.  As such, those hours are when you should get the bulk of your work done.

As for the rest of the day, I prefer to make a simple list in Google Calendar of the major things I should accomplish, both business and personal tasks are included.  I find that I can’t do more than 7 major tasks each day.  What I do in between those tasks depends on what I feel like doing, whether it’s taking a walk, reading a book, carpentry, or even working.  It’s the random tasks surrounding my routine that makes my day more interesting.  They even make my work feel more fulfilling.

The key is not to worry if you feel unproductive at times, there are still some ways for you to feel accomplished at the end of the day.  As long as you get your few major tasks done, you shouldn’t obsess about working during every waking hour.

What preconceived notions on productivity did you have?  Which of these notions were true, and which were false?

Scheduling meetings is a necessary chore we face in business.  Managing multiple person’s calendars and finding a good time to meet involves many back and forth emails.  This is especially true when the persons you’re trying to meet with are on another electronic calendaring system.

To tackle this problem, I looked at Tungle last week. Now let’s look at a similar scheduling application: TimeBridge.

TimeBridge’s approach for addressing this frustrating issue comes from research involving personal assistants.  In my phone interview with TimeBridge CEO Yori Nelken, Mr. Nelken said the company spent hours interviewing personal assistants to find the insider’s tips and tricks for streamlining the scheduling process.  The TimeBridge application is not just a calendar view with all attendees’ free/busy data overlaid on each other.  They have built a meeting organization system with some handy add-ons to make it a powerful scheduling platform.

Currently TimeBridge supports two major calendaring platforms: Microsoft Exchange/Outlook and Google Calendar, including Google Apps for Your Domains.  The TimeBridge application works best when your contacts with whom you wish to meet ‘connect’ their calendars to TimeBridge.

This is done on the Microsoft side by downloading/installing an Outlook toolbar. With Google, you enter your Google sign-on credentials or you go through a process to give TimeBridge access to your Google Calendar.  Most privacy-conscious people will prefer the latter method.

The TimeBridge Process

Connecting your calendar isn’t necessary to arrange a meeting with TimeBridge, it just makes the process easier. For this post, I’ll run through the process assuming no participants have ‘connected’ their calendar to TimeBridge.

To begin scheduling a meeting, log in to TimeBridge and click “Schedule a Meeting”.  Next, enter in the participant’s email addresses, your meeting topic and proposed meeting time(s).  You can also add an optional conference call number at no charge.  Click “Send” and the email invitations are sent out to attendees.  You are also presented with an option to schedule a web conference with WebEx.

The recipients get a message with an invitation to pick which of your proposed meeting times works best for them.  They mark each time slot with their preferences based on their schedule.

After the attendee marks their preferences, a message is sent back to the meeting organizer where he/she finalizes the meeting time, based on everyone’s provided availability.

Finally, all attendees receive an email that contains a meeting notice that can be placed on their respective calendars.

Upon finalization of the meeting, the originator is presented with a link to schedule a reservation (if needed) with OpenTable – an online restaurant reservation service.

About TimeBridge

Mr. Nelken said the company received funding in December of 2005 and began operation in January 2006.  Their team of 24 has seen their usage double over and over about 4 times. They are targeting growth amongst users, rather than engaging CIO-types and IT shops.  TimeBridge has forged a relationship with Google and are providing Google a foot-in-the-door with enterprise customers who are looking at Google Calendar as a possibility for their organizations.

To monetize the product, they have a very innovative approach.  The optional conference call service is a revenue sharing agreement they have set up with the calling service providers.  This gives the company the opportunity to provide customers with a no-advertisement (and potentially annoying) call service and on the back-end, TimeBridge makes money too.  Additionally, the optional web conference option when arranging a meeting is an agreementw with WebEx whereby TimeBridge gets a fee for the new-users sign up.

Following the typical web 2.0 web service model, Nelken stated at some point they will have a premium package, but basic functionality will always remain free.

Conclusion

Tungle required a download and install of an IM-ish application that showed you your contact’s availabililty.  I like that TimeBridge is an Outlook add-in bar, keeping me within Outlook during the scheduling process.

Another interesting feature with TimeBridge is the ability to show your free/busy data on your website and/or social network.  You can register with TimeBridge and get either a widget or embed-able HTML code that you can use on any website.  This might be advantageous for a busy person to show their free/busy data directly on their website for all those who want to schedule a meeting with them.

TimeBridge creates a process for meeting scheduling that is easy and conducive to how meetings are set up in the “real world”.  The optional services makes scheduling meeting resources painless.  Their integration with Google Calendar is a plus, however I’m waiting for them, like Tungle, to support iCal on the Macintosh.  Nelken assured me an iCal application would be released in the near future.