Who hasn’t needed to schedule a meeting with a group of busy people?  It is often like herding cats!

I recently needed to come up with a schedule of candidate interview times for a lab tech position within our department working around the teaching, research and other obligation schedules of the four faculty members on the search committee.  I had heard about a web service, Doodle.com, at David Sparks’ and Katie Floyd’s Mac Power User Workflows session at the recent Macworld/iWorld Conference, so I decided to give it a try.  It worked like a charm.  Rather than asking everyone to give me the times they would like to meet, I sent out a list of times that fit my schedule for everyone to respond to with their availability.  Doodle provides the polling results as a nice, color-coded table that makes it easy to see when everyone is available at a glance.  No more series of back and forth emails or juggling pages of paper schedules.  Yippee!  In fact, I just sent a poll to all of my students presenting their senior seminars this term so I can set up a dress rehearsal schedule, normally a real time-eating task.

 Thanks David and Katie for the great productivity tip!  If you are not familiar with their “Mac Power Users” podcast, you should check it out.