You Ask, I Answer: Scheduling Availability When Working From Home?

In today's episode, Sarah asks question with so many of us working from home right now. How do you communicate availability to your clients and set expectations on response times? So this is a couple things. Number one, you have to know what uh was contractually agreed. If you are in the service industry and uh your company has signed a service agreement with the client specifying what uh the service level agreement is, like you'll receive response within an hour, etc.

Then uh you have to adhere to that, right? You have to do what is in the uh the paperwork, and if you have to, then you know I would strongly suggest modifying your calendar so that there are blocks of time that are locked off, you know, 15 minutes every hour for client response time, so that uh people cannot schedule a meeting over you. The number one rule of calendaring and scheduling is this if you do not control your time, your time will control you. Right. If you do not set limitations and expectations and program them into a system and then live by that system, you will get overwhelmed very, very quickly.

One of the things we do at uh Trust Insights is in our calendar invite system, when you want to have an invite, they have the oddest times. They're offset by five or ten minutes. Again, so that if you're if you happen to have back-to-back meetings, you want that 10 minute buffer uh after each meeting to you know use the restroom, for example, um, grab a cup of coffee, whatever the case is, you have to have that buffer in place. And if you do not put it in, no one is going to give it to you. So you control your time or your time controls you.

That's the rule. Now, you should be using great calendaring software that offers allocated blocks of time. When it comes to um sort of work life balance when you're working from home, you have to set your working hours first. So in your calendaring system, you set your working hours. I'm in the office from you know 9 a.m.

to 4 p.m. or 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., whatever it is your business uh operates as a standard operating procedure. And then you put blocks in your calendar that say, or your calendar software, depending on who you use, may offer those working hour settings and say these are my working hours. When someone goes to schedule a meeting outside of those hours, it automatically gets rejected.

It says outside of working hours. That solves a lot of drama by itself because you can say, Yep, this is when I'm available, and you block those things off. The next thing is to set up an invite system. You decide what windows you want to invite people, you know, 25 minutes, 50 minutes, 40 minutes, etc. And then your calendaring software should do the rest.

Your calendaring software should be uh able to give say here's let's create an i an invite link for a 25 minute meeting or a 40 minute meeting or a 50-minute meeting, and then you give that link to your clients, you give that link to uh your coworkers, etc. And then they get to choose when they want their meeting, but within the boundaries of the calendar. So the software will not let you overbook another meeting. Software will not let you book a meeting outside of working hours. Um, if you uh have specific times, you can say, like, I'm available from one to three p.m.

every day, and then people can choose their slots within that time. That's the best way to do it. Because then you are giving limited control to your customers. But you're giving them control, you're giving them their choice of of picking from available times, but with the understanding that this is what's available. Now you can and you should, depending on the client and their importance to your company, be ready to make exceptions, but for the most part, uh you want to stick to the system as best you can because that way everyone is clear on what the expectations are.

This is when service is available, etc. This is when it's not. If your calendaring system does not offer that, uh like for example, I don't think Microsoft Outlook offers those exact features. You can use third-party services like Doodle or Calendly to help gap fill. Other services like Google Calendar and HubSpot and such offer that scheduling services uh natively, it's it's natively available within the software.

When it comes to response times, again, it depends on what's in the contract and the service level agreement. If uh if you have a 10-minute mandated response time, you have a you have to adhere to that. And so one of the things you would need to do is in your calendar set blocks of time that people can't schedule over, you know, ten minutes in the middle of the hour, ten minutes at the end of the hour, and then you know, you work your meetings around that as best as you can, so that you can address those needs um as they happen. Now, if your calendar is completely full, then you need to move some stuff around to make time for that service level agreement. If you don't have one, uh then you need to figure out what that agreement would look like in informally with uh setting expectations with your clients.

So the easiest way to do that is to look at your last two or three weeks of um of uh calendar time appointments and see how many free blocks of time and how long they are throughout the day. If your calendar is nine to five completely solid, then you can't do anything except you know next day response times and you have to set that expectations. Um if on the other hand you have set down and allocated, you know, uh 15 or 20 minutes every two hours, and you can say, yes, we'll set up a a uh a two hour response time, your concerns will be answered within those two hours, or it will be acknowledged, acknowledged within those two hours, and then you'll book the work from that. Uh if additional work needs to be booked on top of what's already in there. This requires you to have great time tracking and such, because one of the things that happens, especially in agency life, is that clients like to have the service available, but then they don't like to pay for the hours that you use.

So having discipline around your calendar allows you to reduce both problems. If you say to a client, hey, you have ten hours of paid service time, because a lot of agencies work on the on on hours, um, how do you want to use them this month? You know, how many hours you want to book for actual work and how many hours you want to book for meetings and calls. Again, you are giving limited control to the client and saying, here's what's available. You have these ten coins to spend, you spend them in the way that you want them to be spent.

If the client says, I want to spend eight of them on meetings, cool, you'll get eight of them on meetings and you'll get two on work, but you will not get ten hours worth of work in addition to eight hours of meetings. It's it it's just setting those expectations up front. If you have a client that does not respect those limits, then you and your manager need to work with them and be more clear about those expectations to say, like, hey, here's what you have allocated. Here's what is you have paid for. If you want to pay for more, you're welcome to.

Never say no to a client. Say, here's how you can get more by paying more. And what tends to happen an awful lot of the time is clients like, uh, you know what? Never mind. Um, and sometimes there's a legitimate need to say, cool, I will pay more.

Um so you don't say no, you just say uh it will be more expensive. And that typically ends the discussion right there. Most of the time, certainly what it was the case in the public relations world. At the end of the day, literally, it is all about you having the discipline to run your calendar, setting expectations, and then using a system that allows you to control your time. Remember to book things like lunch, right?

Set 45 minutes on the calendar every day for lunch and then stick to that. Um make sure that again, the software you're using, if somebody tries to schedule over an existing block, it should automatically reject it. Should automatically just bounce it back and say, you know, that block is not available. Um in many cases, uh I know for Google Calendar you can, for Outlook you can, you can share a link to your calendar that it just only shows free busy and to say, like, look, here's what's available, right? And if they if your your clients can see, oh wow, there's you know uh no availability for a week and a half, then either they can pay more to override something else, or um, they can accept that the time is simply not there.

Make sure also that you block work time. Uh if you just let your calendar st stay unscheduled, uh time will control you. So if you know you've got a major client project coming up in two weeks, block four hours a day for that work time so that you get that work done. And that way, again, if you're living by your calendar and you've set expectations, your client will say, Wow, there's no availability in the mornings for the next m week week and a half or two weeks or whatever. That way you get your work done.

Uh, that is especially true in any kind of a project based business. Uh, you absolutely need to have uh work time booked so that uh people can see, okay, I can't interrupt during these periods of time. Uh something that I run into a lot in making sure that I have, you know, four hours at a time because some of the work that I do with coding requires you to sit down and think and and and not be interrupted. Finally, make sure that whatever system you choose is compatible with how you work, because if you don't use the system, the system can't work for you. The system will work against you.

So however it is that you work best, if you work best in 20 minute pomodoro increments, or you work best in two hour deep work limits, or whatever the case may be, figure out how the system works that is best suited to your style of work and then adjust your calendar appropriately. But for sure, set those limits and let the software do the rejection for you. If you have follow up questions, leave your comments below. Calendaring is is can be tricky, uh, especially in agency life. Uh and as always, please subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter.

I'll talk to you soon. Take care. Want help solving your company's data, analytics, and digital marketing problems? Visit TrustInsights.ai today and let us know how we can help you.