This article is relevant if you use Google for your Calendar and you desire a method to look up calendar entries and present them in multiple timezones to facilitate scheduling meetings.
Background
As the principal of the NetSuite Systems Integration firm, Prolecto Resources, the demands on my time require that I maintain a full calendar to provide attention to my staff and clients. Thus, using the calendar is a fundamental practice for anyone that seeks to hold their commitments with other people.
The challenge becomes when one seeks to offer dates and times for future availability to schedule a meeting. While there are third-party applications, such as Calendly, their concepts work with the space that is open in the calendar and asks the recipient users to select a date and time with automatic booking.
In my calendar, there really are very few “open spaces”. Meaning, any open space on my calendar needs to be devoted to something purposeful as I am working to manage my commitments carefully.
Using the Calendar to Make Offers of Times
I have more important consideration when I want to schedule a time to meet others.
- I want to specify the dates and times that I am available for a specific meeting.
- I want to communicate that information quickly.
- I also want to remember what dates and times I offered because I have many people making requests for my time and sometimes I need to overlap availability offers.
The Basic Practice to Offer Calendar Dates and Times
Here is the practice that I use to make offers of dates and times that I am willing to take a meeting. It is fast, intuitive, and should work on nearly any calendar system.
- Record Offers: Record calendar entries for the future meeting you wish to schedule. I use a technique to prefix those entries with “T:” where “T” means tentative. Thus, if I want to meet with ABC Company, I will record the entires as “T: ABC”. Anything on my calendar with a “T:” means I have made an offer to someone to meet.
- Recall Offers: Use the calendar Search tool to now find those entries. For example, type “T: ABC” in the search box and you will get a list back.
- Screen Capture Offers: Use a screenshot tool to capture that calendar result list. There are many free screenshot tools available on any platform.
- Email Screenshot: using Gmail, copy and paste the image of the dates and times in an email to help communicate availability to others. This is very fast because I am not writing out (copying) the dates and times, I am using the data provided by the search.
- Delete Rejected Calendar Entries: using the same tool to find the entries, any calendar time offered that is rejected, right-click the entry in the list and delete. This will clean up the calendar.
Click the related images to enlarge.
Adding Timezone Information to Calendar Offerings
The Basic Practice works great if your recipients are located in the same time zone. But what do you do if the recipients are in another time zone? I would often use my screenshot tool to write out what timezone the availability information was supplied. See image. But this made the recipient work to think about translating those times to their timezone. I don’t consider that courteous.
Thus, I went to work to leverage the Google API (the way to program Google to make applications) to produce a similar calendar lookup but to now return back information about the recipient’s timezone. Here is how it works:
- Target Timezone: the application automatically understands what timezone I am in. Thus, default a dropdown with my timezone. Give the option to select the recipient’s timezone.
- Search Textbox: provide a mechanism to search my calendar(s). I say calendars because I have multiple calendars I use for varying purposes. Search all of them for the “T: ABC” entry.
- Format Result with Timezone: return back the results but now show the recipient’s timezone and my timezone with the correct date and time information. Now the screen capture provides good information to the recipient making it much easier for them to interpret availability from their perspective.
Click related image to enlarge.
Download the Google Calendar Lookup with Timezone Application
I have shared this tool with my team and they enjoy it. I wanted to provide this to the open-source community with the hopes that others will make it even better. Thus, I put the code on a public GIT repository located here:
https://gitlab.com/prolecto-public/google-calendar-lookup-with-timezone.git
If you find it useful, let others know. If you enhance it, please consider updating the repository by creating a new branch for review.
If you found this article relevant, feel free to sign up for notifications to new articles as I post them. If you seek one-on-one conversation, feel free to contact me.
Marty Zigman
Holding all three official certifications, Marty is regarded as the top NetSuite expert and leads a team of senior professionals at Prolecto Resources, Inc. He is a former Deloitte & Touche CPA and has held CTO roles. For over 30 years, Marty has produced leadership in ERP, CRM and eCommerce business systems. Contact Marty to set up a conversation.
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