Our meeting scheduler can enhance your team’s productivity and focus by refining your meeting etiquette, optimizing schedules across time zones, and streamlining the scheduling process.
- Manually scheduling and rescheduling is busywork
- A smart calendar assistant streamlines your scheduling, saving time and energy
- Clockwise takes your preferences, Focus Time, and everyone’s time zones into account when suggesting ideal times to meet
No one likes manually scheduling and rescheduling meetings. Well, maybe someone does. But most of us don’t enjoy finding a time, going back and forth with everyone you need to meet with, grabbing a room or setting up a Zoom, and then having to do it all over again when someone double-books. Add time zones, internal and external attendees, and meeting etiquette to the mix, and that’s a lot of unnecessary busywork.
That’s why efficient teams use Clockwise to schedule their meetings, optimize their calendars, and resolve conflicts automatically. Here’s how a smart meeting scheduler like Clockwise can help you plan your workday more efficiently and effectively.
How to schedule meetings with Clockwise
A scheduling assistant is the part of the calendar app that helps you find the best time to meet based on everyone’s availability. Most calendar software offers a scheduling assistant. But standalone tools also integrate with your calendar to simplify scheduling.
One such tool is Clockwise.
One of the worst parts of scheduling new meetings is knowing it will eat into your and your colleagues’ Focus Time (aka your time for deep work). A poorly scheduled meeting in the middle of a block of Focus Time can cost up to 40% of your productive work time.
The Clockwise meeting scheduler suggests meeting times based on their potential impact on productivity. Clockwise automatically generates smart suggestions for when to meet based on more than ten factors, including:
- The timezone of every attendee
- Meeting preferences (e.g., I prefer to meet in the morning)
- Work hours
- Focus Time cost (e.g., will this meeting interrupt a block of free time)
- Meeting conflicts
- No meeting day
- Proactive meeting breaks
- Travel time
- How soon you want to meet
- Preserving time for lunch
Clockwise easily handles even the trickiest time zones, such as locations that don't observe daylight saving or switch over on different days.
To schedule your next meeting with Clockwise, download Clockwise if you haven’t already.
After onboarding, click the “Schedule Meeting” button from the Clockwise sidebar on your work calendar.
Then, tell Clockwise what you need and type a scheduling request into the chat (or directly click on the calendar to manage an event that is already on your calendar).
In the bottom left corner, you’ll see the chat feature, where you can schedule or reschedule a meeting, or create a scheduling link to share with others.
Clockwise will then translate your calendar intent into our proprietary scheduling engine, work magic to analyze calendar data and your preferences in the background, and serve scheduling options quickly.
We’ll provide a suggestion in response to your request, along with a visual overlay on your calendar to the right of the chat, so you can see exactly where the meeting will land alongside the rest of your meetings and commitments.
Some ways you can prompt Clockwise to create a schedule you love:
- Schedule a new meeting (internal, external, ad hoc, or recurring)
- Modify existing events (modify title, time, attendees, RSVP status, flexibility settings, meeting room, video conferencing, and more)
- Schedule tasks and routines (tasks you need to complete but can shuffle around, like your daily walk)
- Create an OOO hold (make yourself unavailable quickly, such as on a sick day)
- Reschedule an existing meeting or bulk schedule and reschedule meetings
- Manage the recurrence schedule of repeating meetings
- RSVP to meetings
- Cancel all meetings
- Create a Scheduling Link to share with external parties
- Schedule more Focus Time
- Get a quick overview of what’s ahead
The best part? Clockwise shows you the trade-offs, such as the hours of Focus Time lost due to the new meeting time.
We won’t make any changes to your calendar unless you explicitly confirm in the chat window that you want to modify the event based on our suggestions. You must select “Confirm” to adjust your schedule. You’re in complete control.
We built meeting scheduling etiquette in
One of the biggest meeting etiquette mistakes we see people making is not factoring Focus Time into scheduling. Clockwise makes it easy to reduce the negative impact a new meeting has on your whole team’s Focus Time.
Another faux pas: Wasting time going back and forth, scheduling and rescheduling. Clockwise also eliminates this busywork for you and your team.
In addition, Clockwise makes it super simple for anyone to create and respect a No Meeting Day for your company or team. After you set up a team in Clockwise, just choose a day:
We work with you and your team to protect your time. Flexible meetings and meetings scheduled using the chat in Clockwise Calendar avoid no-meeting days.
Managing meetings in Clockwise
It’s also easy to view, edit, and reschedule meetings in Clockwise! Once you’re in your Clockwise dashboard, click “Calendar” in the left navigation menu. Select the week you want to look at using the arrows at the top of the calendar. You should see all of the meetings on your calendar for the week (or you can switch to day view if you prefer in the upper right-hand corner).
Click into any of your meetings, and you’ll see Reschedule Suggestions to choose from, along with a “Find more times” button if you don’t like any of the options provided.
Another pain point to scheduling meetings is dealing with calendar conflicts. It’s frustrating to pick a time that works for everyone’s schedule, then have someone come along and schedule right over it!
Clockwise solves this problem (with no effort on your part) through our flexible meeting feature. When you make a meeting flexible, Clockwise can find the best time based on the abovementioned ten-plus factors. Then if someone schedules over it, no problem. Clockwise will find the next best time to meet based on all the same information, so you don’t have to follow up manually.
Clockwise also offers another win for team scheduling: You can set flexible working hours in Clockwise to better support your and your team’s scheduling priorities. When you set your working hours in Clockwise settings, you can split them across the day or week.
This makes protecting your time for non-negotiables and personal commitments easier, regardless of when you want to work. Add, remove, and update any working hour block as needed. Copying your preferred daily schedule across the week takes just one click. Check out our Getting Started guide or head to your settings to adjust your working hours.
Integrate with other apps for a connected experience
Gmail user? Outlook user? No problem — we support both. Clockwise syncs with Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook for an integrated experience.
This means Clockwise connects directly with your calendar, so you don’t have to spend time importing meeting details and information. It’s easy to get started with Clockwise as soon as you download it!
We also offer a powerful Slack integration, equipped for intelligent scheduling and status syncing, so you can schedule the best time to meet with your colleagues without ever leaving Slack.
With this integration, you can message the Clockwise assistant with your scheduling needs directly in Slack. And you can automatically turn on Do Not Disturb when you’re in a meeting or focused on deep work (and we’ll set your status for you, too!).
This integration works with Google Calendar and Outlook Calendar.
Collaboration via Clockwise
Clockwise takes the responsibility of communicating meeting changes to other attendees off your plate. The tool emails you and your colleagues when flexible meeting times are updated, ensuring everyone is aware of the changes. You can customize your email and notification preferences to control which emails you receive.
Another way Clockwise makes scheduling and collaboration easier for teams is that it shows you and your team when everyone is free. Easily sync your personal calendar so no one schedules over your personal events, either. They show as “busy” with no details for privacy.
Clockwise also integrates team calendars automatically, so everyone knows when someone is out of office (OOO) or on holiday. Plus, you get to eat lunch more often as lunch holds appear automatically (based on your settings), so your teammates know when they’re scheduling over your midday break. It’s a win for everyone!
Customize meeting types and other advanced features
Clockwise automatically categorizes your meetings for you using machine learning models. Meeting category options include:
- External: A calendar event with an external attendee invited to the event. We will also attempt to recognize external meetings without an external attendee invited.
- One-on-One: A meeting between you and one other internal attendee.
- Team Sync: A recurring meeting between you and multiple other internal teammates.
- Hold: A calendar event with no other attendees that is not an actual meeting (e.g., travel time, hold for a meeting)
- Focus Time: Blocks of free time within your working hours longer than 2 hours. Holds for Focus Time should also be included here (e.g., No Meeting Wednesday, WFH)
- Ad-Hoc: Internal, non-recurring meetings
- Out of Office: A calendar event indicating you won’t be in the office (e.g., OOO, PTO, Vacation)
- Holiday: A calendar event indicating this is a holiday and attendees won't be in the office. (Learn more about our holiday triggers)
- Other events: All other events not captured by the above.
You can also set up color coding for the event types listed above.
Finally, Business and Enterprise plan users can use Clockwise’s meeting and calendar data export. This feature provides 8-week periods of data for Clockwise users, including the weekly number of focus hours, meetings, and fragmented hours.
Going forward
Scheduling (and rescheduling) manually is tedious and time-consuming work. Using a smart calendar assistant like Clockwise streamlines your scheduling, saving you and your team time and energy. Clockwise suggests meeting times that factor in the preferences, Focus Time, and time zones of everyone involved. It automatically resolves conflicts, helps you schedule more considerately, and makes it easy to split your working hours.
About the author
Alyssa Towns has written productivity and time management content for Clockwise for several years. Early in her career, she dove into time management strategies to effectively manage her workday calendar and 10+ C-Suite officers' calendars across various organizations. She uses her training in change management to write time management, the future of work, and career content that helps people change their behaviors and habits. In addition, she writes about artificial intelligence (AI) and other technology for G2's Learn Hub. When she isn't writing, Alyssa enjoys trying new restaurants with her husband, playing with her Bengal cats, adventuring outdoors, or reading a book from her TBR list.
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