How to build your reputation and not waste other people's time

As we run our businesses, we should keep in mind the Swiss Railway system. Why? Because time matters. Being on time and delivering on time is important not just for our business, but for the businesses of all those people that we deal with as well. Today, we're going to look at scheduling and how you can use individual and group scheduling software to make sure your business runs on time, yet doesn't take up too much of it, because, yes, you've guessed it, we can automate time scheduling. 

I'm prompted to talk about time, because we had a little bit of a calamity in the household today where the two parents hadn't really communicated properly. The daughters had arranged times to meet with friends, and the belief was that they had told the parents, and the parents would talk to each other. As a result, we ended up being late for an appointment. The children were upset and disappointed, because they like to be on time. This got me to thinking about how being late or rearranging schedules can impact our reputation at work as well. 

When we're late or disorganized in scheduling, it first of all weakens our position. It makes us look as though we're not in control of our own time. And obviously, when we're managing other people, like staff, suppliers, or customers, not being in control of our own time creates a huge amount of stress. There's one view that when you're not on time, you're "stealing" from the other person who was there on time. They made the effort to be there, and you didn't, so that's not fair. Being late wastes time, because we have to catch up, and that causes us to rush what we're doing.

For those of us with time-based businesses, being late or not being there at all wastes money. If you look at why people go to a doctor or lawyer, it's because they don't waste their time by traveling for free. People come to our house, and they don't charge for the trip. There's a reason why we visit the lawyer, accountant, or doctor, and why those are some of the best paid professions, because they log their time and work very efficiently too. We get judged on our ability to manage ourselves, and that translates into how people think we're going to manage the work that we're going to do for them. If we say we're efficient in our jobs but we're late, it looks as though we're not even in control of our own faculties, let alone in charge of the faculties that we're going to bring to bear for our clients. Being late also tends to annoy the other party. I will wait 15 minutes for somebody, and then I will leave. If someone I'm going meet will be late, I would like them to tell me that, and I would tell people if we're going to be late as well. As you can see, being on time is also about respect and consideration of others' time. 

As most of us are now working remotely, we can no longer just shout out and ask people if they're free on a certain day and time. It needs to be more organized than that. The challenge is that we're all using technology, and we're often using more than one operating system that is a combination of personal systems, like mobile phones running on Android or iOS, and professional systems, perhaps working on Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Google, or iCloud, plus the huge number of project management software available like Asana, Slack, and Trello. 

As we try and schedule our time, which is something I've been working on myself in the last couple of months, the issue now is how do I schedule my professional time across timezones? How do I schedule that within myself and my own schedule, but also that of my team's, and my clients'? How do I differentiate between what is my time versus professional time? We often use one system for personal time and one for professional time, and that creates another group of conflicts. So, let's look at some tools we can use as well as some considerations. 

I've been looking at a couple of criteria when it comes to scheduling, and one is flexibility. EastWest PR is relatively simple. People are booking time, but they're booking time with different values. The appointment scheduling software that I need enables me to have, for example, a 15-minute event that might be a free chat, but also may be a 60-minute podcast which is free, but if it's a client or a consulting arrangement, it's a 45-minute paid-for slot, which is then linked to a payment gateway. I need a system that enables me to customize the time and the meeting slot, give it a description, integrate payment, and send those who have booked a slot some instructions, because I'm trying to reduce the time that I do repeatable tasks through automation. If someone wants to book a session with me, I send them a list of questions when they book the appointment. A lot of us do this already, but it saves us from having to do this repeatedly if we have a scheduling software. This is what flexibility is, looking at what kind of appointments I can book, how I can book them, and if those systems synchronize. 

The second criterion is calendar syncing. The systems that we're using are different to the systems that are created by the professional services app people like Acuity or Calendly, and we need to ensure that they synchronize. I've been using Calendly, and that's been been excellent. It synchronizes very nicely with my iCloud account, but the calendar that we choose needs to sync with Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook Calendar, or any other calendar app.

Calendly's features

Another issue is payment processing. There are different payment methods. I'm using PayPal, but there's also Stripe and Transferwise. Some allow direct payment to your bank account. Some will allow taking a deposit for an appointment before the appointment has actually taken place, and some enable refunds to take place. Because so many of us now attach time and money to one another, it's obvious and essential that we can link the appointment booking with the payment processing, because it saves us trying to send an invoice after the event, which creates extra work for us.

The other thing is multiple points of access. I have appointment booking through my website, but I also attach a link in my email for people to make a booking. Some of the more established booking applications allow us to embed a widget into our social media websites, such as Facebook, Wordpress, or Google My Business. Looking at whether the calendar app that you choose enables you to have appointments set for you on multiple points of access is also really important. One element that I've been looking at is the integration with other calendars. Outlook, Office 365, Exchange, iCloud, and Google Calendar seem to be the main ones, but what we found is that some of these newer platforms like Asana or Basecamp also need to synchronize with our own desktop and mobile phone calendars.

Another application that I particularly like and I'm looking at is SMS integration. The more powerful calendaring systems will send notifications to all parties, not just through email, but through SMS. Sites like Acuity are doing this, and Acuity is used by WealthBuilders which I'm a member of here in the UK, and I get a really nice SMS, which might be integrated into their content management system. That replaces the need for them to send me an email or call me. Zoho has an integration with SMS as well. 

One other point worth considering is if you'd need to set up appointments offline and have them synchronized. Back in the late '90s, we would have a Microsoft Exchange Server, but it would only go online to synchronize with everybody once a day. Amazing to think that, isn't it? Now, there's a platform called Setmore which has a desktop app for people to set appointments on. This could be useful if you're in the field, and you don't have mobile connectivity. That's the only reason I can think of why you wouldn't want to have real-time synchronization. It also operates and allows for integrations with business software like MailChimp, QuickBooks, Salesforce, Zendesk, and Zoho. 

Integration is such a key part now of scheduling, because we're all using multiple platforms and multiple apps on multiple devices. Where I went with this was I started with Calendly, and then we started to use the Zoho CRM and Zoho One which is the platform with over 50 apps in it (including Zoho Bookings) for $30 a month. I wanted to integrate my Zoho CRM with Zoho Bookings and my team, because we've got Zoho Projects, and I wanted to have just one platform for managing all environments. The problem was that having a three-way synchronization between Calendly, Zoho, and iCloud was creating too many duplicate events. We had to make the decision to remove Calendly from the group, so now we just have the synchronization between Zoho and iCloud which works nicely. A minor issue with Zoho is that it doesn't currently integrate with Zoom. 

Zoho

For all of us that are using Zoom or Microsoft Teams, the integration of Calendly with Zoom was very nice. It would enable someone to make a booking and automatically issue an appointment generated by zoom along with the domain and the passcode. Really, it was an all-in-one solution. If you need to integrate Microsoft Teams, then you have extra work to do. What we're currently doing as a workaround is Zoho offers integration with GoToMeeting, and they have their own Zoho Meetings application, but they say they're going to be integrating Zoom very shortly. We know that's on the horizon, because they've integrated Zoom with the CRM already. What we'll do for now is manually process the booking and send out an inquiry to people if they want Zoho Teams or Zoom, then we will have to manually create that booking for them. 

If we look at the pricing, Zoho Bookings is part of the $30-a-month bundle on Zoho One. Acuity Scheduling, on the other hand, has a free option and a paid plan for $15 a month. With Calendly, I believe I paid about $150 a year for the companywide account which enables multiple users. You can book for not just one person, but for teams which is another dimension we need to think about. There's also a company called Timify which claims to have 45,000 businesses in 26 countries using their software. They're free for single users and startups with a ￡18, ￡30, ￡52 monthly plans for businesses with unique needs. I did a quick look on Capterra, which has a free trial and is a scheduling software with automated scheduling, which I think is important. There are 68 companies that will offer you free trials with automated scheduling. Zapier has got a blog post with what they call "The top best appointment scheduling software," but they don't include some like Calendly, which seems like a pretty significant omission to me, so I'm not going to rely on that list.

Personally, I like Calendly and was very happy with that, but it didn't suit my bigger needs of integrating the scheduling with my whole team and my project management applications. My goal is to integrate my business processes than just Zoom, but we all make these different decisions. One of the considerations is about our business process, and another is about our reputation. In 2018, The Bild in Germany released an article saying that the pride of the German state was once its railways, that it used to be the envy of much of the world, but the national railway network is now showing considerable signs of strain and decline, and there were accusations of chronic underinvestment in its infrastructure. The Bild ran the article and in it, it said, "To the neighboring Swiss who are annoyed by German unpunctuality because it messes up their own train timetable, we're becoming a joke."

The important point here is that our own time and how we manage it isn't important just to us. Much like the German train system impacting the Swiss train system, our own time management impacts all of those around us. I'm sure we all know why time is important, but I hope I've shared some useful applications that will help you manage your time better and work more efficiently. Even though we're small in our size of a business, and we're using multiple locations, logins, and platforms, there are tools out there that enable us to automate and personalize at scale our time management. 

This is a transcript from our podcast which you can find on EastWest PR. If you're interested in learning more about what we do, you can sign up for our newsletter here.

Cover Photo by Malvestida Magazine on Unsplash