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After receiving yet another campus-wide meeting invitation for an event in an ongoing series that I am never going to attend, I decided I was done manually processing these invitations. By manually processing, I mean, clicking “decline.” Every. Single. Time. Unfortunately, there is not a way (yet?) to tell Outlook to automatically decline meeting invitations from specific people or with specific words in the subject line, so we have to cobble together a few things to 1) delete the meeting invitation as soon as it arrives, 2) hide the unaccepted/undeclined meeting invitation from Outlook calendar, and 3) for those who synch their Outlook calendar withRead More →

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I first wrote about the YouCanBook.Me scheduling tool in 2010. YouCanBook.Me checks your web-based calendar to see when you are free, and then makes your free times schedulable by others, such as students. To access YouCanBook.Me’s full power, you need a pro account ($9/month, billed yearly). For what it can do, the money may be worth it to you. It was to me—until Office 365 Bookings. Recently, Microsoft developed a tool with similar functionality as part of its Office 365 suite. If you have Office 365, you have Bookings. Because Bookings and Outlook are in the same suite of tools, Bookings automatically has access toRead More →

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My college is on quarters, so it’s time once again for me to reset the due dates on my courses in preparation for spring quarter. I organize my class schedule by weeks, so it’s helpful for me to know what week it is in the quarter—both when I’m setting my due dates for the upcoming quarter, and when we’re in the middle of a quarter. When I do this at home, I write the week numbers on a paper calendar to help me with scheduling. Today I was working on it in my office where I don’t have a paper calendar. I thought, “Hmmm… IRead More →

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[Update 7/1/2015: Super.cc appears to be no more.] In academia, email continues to be our primary means of communication. Since this is where we spend most of our working hours, it makes sense that we use email to keep our lives sorted. For email messages I want to follow up on, I forward them to followup.cc. For email messages I need to do something with, I forward them to Trello, my preferred task management system. And this is why I’m excited about the newest addition to my email arsenal: Super.cc. Now I can use email to add appointments to my Google calendar. Signing up. GoRead More →

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Are you looking for a tool that works as a to-do list manager and a project manager? A tool that will work for your own use as well as being good for collaborative work? A tool that is as effective and easy to use as it easy pretty? A tool that works well on both your computer and on your mobile device? Trello has it all, for free. Trello Gold, $5/month or $45/year, gives you added functionality. Everything you see here is what’s available in the free version. Do you remember the old school video games that came with a thick user’s manual that youRead More →

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In 2011 I wrote about YouCanBook.Me (see this blog post), the very cool service that lets others schedule themselves into your calendar. YouCanBook.Me has business as its target audience, so many of its features are more than what the run-of-the-mill academic needs. Calendly has arrived on the scheduling scene with a manageable set of features in a user-friendly interface. Like YouCanBook.Me, Calendly will sync with your Google Calendar. Those who have been intimidated by YouCanBook.Me will find Calendly to be as approachable as a golden retriever puppy. What Calendly looks like from the student’s perspective A student goes to my Calendly calendar: http://calendly.com/sfrantz. In stepRead More →

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For the YouCanBook.Me users (see this blog post for more info about this service), did you know that you can let more than one person sign up for a given time slot? Let’s say that you wanted to do group advising, or perhaps you’re signing up, say, 10 participants at a time for a study you’re doing. On the “advanced” tab, change “units per slot” to the number of people you want to be able to sign up at one time. If you change this to 10, then YouCanBook.Me will show each time slot as being available until 10 people have signed up for it.Read More →

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Did you know that you can ‘import’ a gmail message into a new Google calendar event? Did you know that what most of us call appointments, Google calls events? “I have an event scheduled with my dentist.” That makes it sound way more serious than an annual checkup should sound. I don’t really know what ProjectX is, but it certainly sounds worthy of the “event” designation, however. Here I’ve received a message about needing to meet to discuss ProjectX in my gmail account. When I click on the “More” button, I get a dropdown menu where I can select “Create event.” This generates a newRead More →

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I’m attending a workshop at a nearby college in a couple weeks, and the organizer has already emailed me a parking pass to print and bring with me. As I was thinking about where to save the parking pass so I won’t forget it, I thought, “I wish I could just save it in my calendar.” After a little investigation, you can do that in Google Calendar. Go to settings by clicking on the cog icon, and select “Labs”. Scroll down to “Event attachments” and click “Enable.” Now when you create a new event or edit an existing one, you have an “Add attachment” option.Read More →

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My favorite appointment scheduling service, YouCanBook.Me, lets people book themselves into your calendar. (See this earlier blog post for more about how YouCanBook.Me works.) One hesitation in using the service I’ve heard from faculty is that they want students to request appointment times, not have the appointment automatically confirmed. You now have that control. Choose your YouCanBook.Me calendar you’d like to edit. On the “advanced” tab, at the very bottom, check “make new bookings tentative”. The next person who selects an appointment time will get text at the top of the confirmation screen that reads “**This booking is not yet confirmed**”. You may want toRead More →