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From time to time you may find yourself with a slight scheduling drama on your hands. You arrive into work in the morning, you look at your calendar and there seems to be two appointments at the same time, or two which run into each other and can’t possibly be separated.
Panic!
What do you do?
Firstly, stay calm. There’s no point in having a minor panic attack at this point, what you need to do is be proactive and do your best to avoid a pending drama from occurring on the premises.
The earlier you find the scheduling clash the better, so always make sure that you check your calendar first thing in the morning. If you have your schedule synced onto your phone, check it on the way to work so you know what you’re dealing with when you arrive at your office desk. If you notice a clash, make dealing with it your first priority.
You have the following options:
• Look if you can move anything around to accommodate both commitments, and if so, do what you can to minimise the impact
• If you cannot move anything around, you will need to choose the most important out of the two and focus on that one. The other commitment will need to be moved to the next day, or later in the day if at all possible. Call the person involved (if it is a meeting) and ask if you can postpone, saying that you will work around their calendar to reschedule. It goes without saying that you should apologise, but do not admit to double booking; say “something came up”, it seems less unprofessional!
• If all else fails and you cannot cancel, try and streamline both commitments, without affecting quality. If you have two clients overlapping, you could call ahead to the second one and mention that you may be running 15 minutes late. If you can’t get hold of them, inform the receptionist of the issue, and ask them to keep your client comfortable on the reception sofas with a refreshment or two
These are your best options, and the earlier you get to work on putting one into action, the better!
If you do find this issue coming your way, don’t despair too much and certainly don’t make yourself feel bad about it. Scheduling and time management issues can happen for a variety of different reasons, and if two people are using the same calendar, e.g. you have an assistant and you’re also inputting meetings, double bookings are easily on the cards. What you should do in this case is ensure that in the future it doesn’t happen again, by having just one person doing the scheduling, and double-checking your diary before agreeing to anything.
The contemporary office is a busy place, and it might also be that meeting rooms are accidentally double-booked. A good way to avoid this is to have a booking system for meeting spaces and have one person responsible for keeping that system up to date. You can easily use an app or a calendar, ensuring that everyone is aware of who they need to go to in order to book a room.
This is also useful for ‘drop in’ meetings, e.g. if two members of staff want to discuss a confidential issue and they want to do so away from the main office space. In this case, they can check with the calendar holder if a room is free and simply go straight there.
Of course, carefully scheduling your day will help you to avoid double bookings in the future. Whilst it probably won’t 100% cut out the possibility from ever happening again, it will drastically reduce the chances. That means when you arrive at your office chairs in the morning, you know what you have to do, and you aren’t worrying about how you’re going to juggle two meetings in one space of time!