As an EA, you’ve likely thought about looking into calendar tools for scheduling and management. Good calendar management is less about the tool than the habits around it, and below is what we have seen work across more than a decade of placing executive assistants. Not only will it help you successfully manage an executive calendar, it takes your calendar management responsibilities and makes them feel less like a chore and more like a strategic win.
Since it’s your job to make sure your executive is spending their day-to-day as efficiently as possible, you obviously need an approach that makes overall schedule management a breeze. With the right best practices, calendar management just got a whole lot more glamorous. Keep reading to learn how.
Calendar Management for Executive Assistants
Calendar management for executive assistants is a non-stop duty. If you’re asking yourself, “what is calendar management, and what does it entail?”—here’s a breakdown!
Effective calendar management is a cognitive skill that combines priority management and time management to optimize one or more calendars. It’s based on understanding where time is best spent, and then planning accordingly. Easy, right? Well, without a clear system, it can be downright challenging. Not to mention time consuming!
Below are some calendar management tips from our own EA team. No matter if you’re supporting one exec or ten, you need to be on your game.
- 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 quickly once you look.
- One place for context: Keep meeting notes, events, files and attachments together with the recurring update you send your executive. This gives them a comprehensive view of everything they need in one convenient place.
- Color coding: 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.
Schedule Management for Executive Assistants
Every seasoned EA knows the importance of scheduling efficiency. It’s our job to make sure our executive is spending their valuable time as wisely as possible, and strategic scheduling is a must. Since scheduling meetings for your exec can take up a large portion of your day, we want to help cut back on the time it takes so you can increase your overall productivity. Below are a few tactics to streamline the process.
- Template scheduling: While automation is great for some tasks, there will still be those inevitable back-and-forth emails we’re expected to tend to. As an executive assistant, scheduling email templates is beneficial in instances when the same verbiage is used in many of your responses. This way, you won’t have to repeatedly retype the same reply.
- 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!
- Propose several times at once: Offering guests a handful of options while holding preferred space in your exec’s calendar removes most of the back and forth, and keeps you in control of their week rather than reacting to whoever books first.
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