Status: LIVE

Calendar Events

Basics: Sender

• Add an agenda to the meeting invite.

• Attach a call link to the event if you have remote participants. We use Google Meet, but oblige the customer if they prefer something else.

• Attach a location to the event, especially when there are external participants.

• Add a note in the event description for where attendees should track their time for this meeting, e.g. MAR-123. You can skip this if it's obvious.

• Book meeting rooms.

• Give plenty of notice when organising meetings, ideally 48h+.

• Inform participants ahead of time of any preparation that you expect them to do.

• When cancelling events, state a short reason why, and whether or not the event will be moved.

• Meetings are limited to 45 minutes. If you need a longer meeting, you can do so, but you have to provide a 5-10 min break.

• For on-site meetings with external people add our COVID-19 Guidelines. This is an example for the description of an external calendar event:

Basics: Recipients

• Let the group know your attendance plans by RSVPing to meeting invites.

• Don’t come unprepared. Take the time to do any preparation that was asked of you.

Advanced

• Use the convention "Adam <> Eve" when meeting with 2 people. Out of politeness, always put the other person's name first.

• When sending out calendar invites for events that are subject to change, or just to reserver a timeslot, use the [hold] convention in the event name (e.g. "[hold] project X kickoff").

  • This is useful when you suggest a timeslot to a customer via email (e.g. “can you do Friday 17:00?”), because you need to keep that slot until the customer confirms.

  • If some of your teammates should also reserve their time, invite them to the [hold] event.

  • If you offer say 3 timeslots to a customer, then make 3 [hold] appointments, and delete the other 2 once the customer confirms which one they're taking. This signals to your teammates that this slot might not be needed 100% yet, but that they should be available and prepared to take the meeting during these times.

• Learn how to use timezone support in your calendar app when scheduling with people across different timezones. Do you know why the time difference between New York and Vienna is 5 hours for a few weeks in the year and 6 hours otherwise? Do you know about local time discontinuities (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6841333/why-is-subtracting-these-two-times-in-1927-giving-a-strange-result)?  If not, and if you don't know about all the other weirndesses of timezones, then don't do the math manually. Always rely on a calendar app with proper timezone support. In a pinch you can use www.worldtimebuddy.com

• Communicating across cultures:

  • When communicating with parties in different timezones, be polite and quote times in their timezone. Use the city name convention like "New York time" when referring to timezones. Don't use CET or ET, because you'll sometimes get that wrong: for example in the summer no country observes CET (the region observes another timezone called CEST), or it could be ET DST.

  • Using something like "4pm New York time" is unambiguous and is preferred.

  • When spelling out times, localise it to the other party. We use 24h mode in Europe (e.g. 16:20), but when talking to someone in the US, be polite and use the 12h format and say 4:20pm.

  • Remember that different countries use different date formats. Is this the fifth of January or the first of May: 05/01? In Europe it's the former, in US it's the latter. In Austria Christmas would be 25.12.19, in Croatia it would be 25.12.2019., in UK it's 25/12/2019. Within Europe it's typically day/month/year, with slight variations in the delineator (/ vs .), 0 padding and year length. So within Europe it's pretty hard to get confused and you don't need to pay that much attention. But the US uses a format like 12/25 or 12/25/2019, i.e. month/day/year. Here there very much is opportunity for confusion. It's not just the US. When communicating across such cultures, then do some quick research on their preferred format and localise it for your counterparty. If you need something that is relatively safe to use across all countries, then use this format: 2019-12-25.

  • Beware that 10.123 could be interpreted as either ~10 bananas or ~10000 bananas. I once quoted an American a project budget of 65.144 EUR and he was impressed at how accurately we quoted our hourly rate, and then politely explained to me that he doesn't need an hourly rate but would prefer a total cost 🤦‍♀️. Austria and Croatia use a comma (,) as the decimal separator. UK and US use a period (.). Prefer the customer's locale to avoid confusion.

See also:

• Meeting Protocol