One of the greatest advantages of being a virtual assistant is the freedom it gives in terms of location. You can literally sit anywhere in the world as long as you are connected and have a place to work from! But in the same way that assistants are more mobile, so are clients. Meetings are as likely to be scheduled with Cambodia as Kansas these days, and not to mention the business travel that goes with it.
With this increasing mobility also comes the increasing complexity of managing multiple time zones. Scheduling a meeting with more than two time zones can be a real pain, trying to find a time that is not in the middle of the night for anyone. Fortunately there are plenty of handy little apps to help with that, one such addition is myMeetingTime.com which makes scheduling meetings across time zones a breeze.
Features
- Ability to add as many locations as you like
- Works with cities, countries and the most common time zone abbreviations
- Automatically recommends you the best time for your chosen locations, to adjust it you simply drag the bubbles along the time line
- Highlights if the selected time is within the “business hours” for all participants (no more call suggestions!)
- Makes it easy to share the selected time, either by copying it to an email or sharing a link to the view
How to use it
Using myMeetingTime.com is very simple:
First, set the host location by starting to type in the input boxes. The system automatically guesses which location you are trying to type so just hit “enter” when the right one shows up. Then enter all the participating locations, you can enter as many as you like. myMeetingTime will now recommend you a time that works for all the chosen participants. If you would like to adjust the suggested time, simply drag the big blue bubble along the timeline until you find a suitable time.
Once you’ve found a set of times you like you may either share it via email by clicking on the “Share via email” button and copy the text to your email, or you may share a link to the view, using the “Share as link” button. Sharing a link means that your recipient will see exactly the same time suggestion that you have on your screen, making it easy to communicate about. If you often need to convert times between the same time zones, you can add those times to the timeline and then create a link and bookmark that link. That way you don’t have to keep entering the same locations over and over!
This information was provided by David from myMeetingTime. David came across my Twitter profile and noticed I offer a lot of good advice for virtual assistants. He wondered if his new little app for managing meetings across time zones would be valuable for my network. I asked him to provide us with more information so we could write a blog post about his app and share the link to it.
I’m excited to have such a quick, easy way to manage meeting times now. Give it a try and share your thoughts below.