Jagalicious Fresh

I hate scheduling. Period.

Don’t get me wrong, Google Calendar is my PDA BFF; it’s made keeping track of my life so much easier than it used to be. I love that my boss and his family use it as well, it makes keeping track of work stuff a breeze. BUT: scheduling events is still a giant pain in the ass. Who’s free when? Who can’t do which time? The more people, the harder it gets.

So I got really excited when the Digital Marketer (a podcaster who’s a part of the Quick and Dirty Tips series that I love so much) mentioned a number of new web applications to help with this problem.

The best by far looks like a neat tool called Time Bridge. It’s so ridiculously simple that I’m a little shocked it hadn’t been developed previously. You enter the email addresses of your invitees for a meeting, lunch, get-together, conference call, whatever. Time Bridge links to your Google Calendar or your Outlook Calendar, loading data on the fly as you create the invitation. It shows which times you’re free, and which you’re booked, based on your existing calendar. You can then pick up to give time slots when you’d be free to have the meeting.

A click of the send button not only sends the invitation to your recipeients, but also blocks your proposed meeting times on Google Calendar so you don’t double book yourself (who hasn’t done that; told two people you can meet on Monday and they’ve both confirmed for the same time). The recipient (and you can send it to multiple people at a time) chooses whether or not they can meet at the various times you’ve proposed, and can choose which of the available times would work best for them. Once the’ve replied, TimeBridge schedules the meeting for you. It adds it to your calendar, frees up the other times you’d blocked off, zero work on your end. Freaking….awesome.

And, for your signupphobic friends who don’t like giving out their info to every new web startup: the recipient doesn’t have to sign up to confirm the meeting. Only the sender has to have an account.

At first I was thinking this would be great for scheduling meetings for my boss, but really I feel like this is going to work even better for personal stuff. Ever tried to get five of your friends together for a dinner out? Ever have all of them work in politics and realize their schedules are fubared beyond reason? This can make that soooooo much simplier.

So yay for Time Bridge. I’m thinking of using you right now