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43 Folders | A bunch of tricks, hacks, and other cool stuff This is a good Podcast. The first episode I listened to the author explained that he hates his phone. He’s had it for four years and hates everything…

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43 Folders on Group Scheduling

43 Folders reports on a funny lo-fi way to find the best date for an event based on several people?s schedules. It’s a clever idea, but of course a MUCH more convenient way is to set up a free group calendar at CalendarHub.

I’ll done something like that for organizing the 31th december party: a spreadsheet at numsum, http://numsum.com/spreadsheet/show/4418 for counting people who came, and when (the hours are for the boat). But I have to edit everything myself after replies. I hope that public editing will arrive at numsum, wiki-like. I’m actively lobbying for that.

ok, english grammar isn’t on my side today.

Emailing a text-based scheduler

Coordinating meeting availability is hard.  The concept of an emailable text-based meeting scheduler makes it easier, but I’m thinking this would suck in an environment where most everyone is using proportional-width fonts and/or HTML in email.

…

Why not try this? :

http://www.meetingwithapproval.com

Does the same thing, but with automatic mailing &c, does not require an account.

It’s http://www.meetwithapproval.com .. my apologies

I have a similar tool I created back in 1999 but with a CGI interface (easier to manipulate the columns and people can respond asynchronously). See http://thinking.teiru.net/sched

I had ideas for improving the interface (allowing the table to be rotated so that the people are listed in rows rather than in columns, only displaying each user’s entries while they are editing them, allowing users to add new date/time possibilities, creating a GUI for setting up new scheduler instances, etc) but never got around to implementing them.

The existing tool is available under the terms of the GPL if anyone wants to play with it.

I has a boring train trip, and I wanted one of these of my own.

Command line python script here: http://caelyx.net/howto/code/scheduler.py

To use just download it, dump it somewhere (in your $PATH) is good, make it executable (“chmod a+x scheduler.py”), and run it from the terminal. Running it without arguments gives you the next 21 days. You can also specify the number of days as the first argument, and your name as the second. So, if your name is Merlin, and you want to give a 14 day calendar, run it as:

./scheduler.py 14 Merlin

Bug reports and suggestions welcome: projects _ at _ caelyx.net

This is why people use Outlook.

This reminds me of my mom. She would make up “easy” ways to remember complicated math stuff, but her tricks were often harder to remember than the actual process.

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Peter Clay said:

This is why people use Outlook.

Percent of email users who can use the article’s suggestion: 100

Percent of email users who use Outlook: much less than 100

Any questions?

i think the take-home lesson from this is, where possible, use set based rather than point based communication… when setting up meetings don’t ask “can you come on the 19th, sally can only make it then, and if you can’t then we might have to reschedule this and that…”

likewise, in engineering, don’t let the design dept deliver a finished design to the manufacturing dept and say “can you make this.” because they’ll say “no. make these changes” then design make the changes and come back and ask “can you make this?” and manufacturing will say “no” again… and when they finally do say “yes” and go ahead amd manufacture it, then they go to marketing and say “can you sell this” marketing will say “no, make these changes” so manufacturing says “oh… nuts. ah, design dept? yeah, we have a problem.”

design, manufacturing, marketing and quality etc etc etc MUST all sit down and work on the entire process as a single unit, and they must communicate like the above diagram: design dept says “this is the range of design ideas we can develop” manufacturing says “We can make all these things - some of which you have designs for - bewty - and some of which may trigger new ideas” and marketing says “we can sell this, this and this.” and I bet that, hey presto, this style of communication would cut the whole project by half and there’d be fewer mistakes and fewer dead ends and less wasted and repeated work.

What I do as a meeting organizer is to send everyone a range of dates and have them tell me when they are NOT available during that time. I then pick a date that most everyone or the key people are available and send out the announcment.

I’m sorry to say but the ASCI meeting scheduler would be too complex for most of the people I set up meetings with. I would spend more time teaching the system and fixing errors. Very bright people, but not engineers or computer geeks.

Does anybody else notice that “Ville” (from the example calendar) is available to meet on December 25? And on every weekend except for the 30th? I don’t think GTD is working well enough for him.

Another service for scheduling is running at http://www.doodle.ch - very simple and very practical, I find.

[…] On 43 folders, there is this entry about a calendar that you could use when coordinating with a small group of people. Let’s say you and your client plus one more person - maybe another person your client got on the project, or whoever. This is a quick way of seeing everything and you do not have to be all using the same e-mail client. What you mainly need to do is “send emails with an ASCII, monotype text representation of the possible dates and times, each person uses a symbol to indicate their preference and availability.” […]