As an EA, having to constantly juggle your Executive’s time is a complex operation and to those supporting multiple execs. Kudos! As assistants ourselves, we understand that this can be a huge undertaking. One thing that’s made the process of supporting our executives a whole heck of a lot easier, you ask? Schedule and calendar management.

Listen, it’s not lost on us that there are a ton of assistants out there who have never been shown how to proactively and efficiently manage their executive’s calendar. Nobody teaches this, and most EAs work it out the hard way. 

Learning the skills to effective calendar management isn’t just for the benefit of the executive! It’s also a great way to make yourself stick out. Anyone can add stuff to a calendar. EAs build credibility when they can take the various tasks and meetings and arrange them in a way that enhances the operations of their executive. 

Keep reading for the calendar management practices our own assistants rely on.

An EAs Calendar Management Responsibilities 

As we all know, calendar management responsibilities for an EA are never a “one and done” thing. It’s our job to pay attention to our executives’ schedule shifts and adjust their calendars accordingly. 

Taking on calendar management for a leader means every decision you make should be decisive and made with your exec’s precious time in the forefront of your mind. There’s no time for scheduling errors when your executive is expected to be in so many back-to-back meetings throughout the week. As an EA, calendar and schedule management will go a long way in getting you noticed. Here are the scheduling responsibilities worth mastering:

• Creating a routine for your exec: It’s up to you to make sure your executive is starting each day with a clear plan of what needs to be achieved. It’s said that routine is the secret to effective time management, so ensuring your exec has time to do tasks and tend to meetings is your duty.
• Time blocking: Blocking off time in your executive’s schedule for particular tasks is a great habit to get into. From reviewing their emails to prepping for meetings, they’ll thank you for finding these important sweet spots in their schedule.
• Scheduling meetings: It’s an EAs responsibility to work with multiple people back and forth to find the right meeting times for your exec. Offering a handful of times and gathering guests’ preferences in one pass beats a long email chain every time.
• Get specific with meetings: While meetings are a necessary part of an executive’s schedule, you need to make sure of two things before accepting meetings: 1. That it’s not a “coulda been an email” scenario, 2. That you have all the info your exec will need to show up prepared.
• Work to open time up for your exec: Your executive only has so many hours in the day, so even though it might not work out every week, open up some time where your exec can catch up with the team. Maybe something needs their quick collaboration. You can help give them some time to do so without cutting into their schedule.

Calendar Management Skills For Executive Assistants

No matter if you’re supporting one exec or ten, here are some calendar management tips from our team of professional assistants:

• Calendar audit: Ah, yes. The almighty calendar audit. Periodically review how your executive is spending their time, when they’re busiest, and who they’re meeting with most often. Patterns show up fast once you actually look, and they give you something concrete to bring back to your exec.
• Keep context with the calendar: Meeting notes, events, files and attachments should sit where your executive will look for them, not in a separate thread. This gives them a comprehensive view of everything they need in one convenient place.
• Color coding: This is one of our favorite tips! Though it may seem basic, we’ve received a lot of feedback about how color coding an executive calendar can enhance organization and help you both approach the week with more clarity. It’s a highly effective way to quickly visualize the week ahead and stay aligned with different goals and priorities.

There’s a lot EAs can do to enhance overall calendar management, and the possibilities are close to endless once you stop treating the calendar as a booking system and start treating it as your executive’s most constrained resource.

Scheduling Made Easy and Efficient

For many of us, scheduling meetings for our executive(s) takes up a large portion of our day. To cut back on the time it takes and increase overall productivity, there are a few techniques we highly recommend. Consider the utilization of the following:

• AI automation: Oftentimes, when EAs receive an email, all that’s required of us is an acknowledgment and creation of an action item. When utilizing AI for schedule management, you can teach it to recognize these instances based on a keyword or phrase. Once the buzzword or phrase is stated, you can set it up to trigger an automated response and task in your chosen management platform.
• Template scheduling: For many of us, scheduling meetings for our executive takes up a large portion of our day. While automation is great for some tasks, there will still be those inevitable back-and-forth emails we must tend to. Since the same verbiage is typically used in many of your responses, it’s beneficial to make and schedule templates ahead of time. This way, you won’t have to retype the same reply over and over again.
• Click-to-call: An amazing way to simplify scheduled phone calls is to use “click-to-call” numbers in Google Calendar holds. When calling into conference calls, you typically need to dial both a phone number and an access code. The great thing about using “click-to-call” for conference lines is that your executive won’t have to worry about manually dialing either number.

One more worth building into your routine: propose several times at once while holding the preferred slots in your exec’s calendar. It removes most of the back and forth, and it keeps you in control of their week rather than reacting to whoever books first.

Grow Your EA Career With Base

Base has spent more than a decade placing and supporting executive assistants, and we help assistants build careers worth staying in. Calendar management is one of the skills that most reliably gets an EA noticed, and it is one of the things we look for when matching assistants with executives.

Explore our learning and development programs, browse EA job opportunities, or see how we support assistants through their careers.