How can you streamline scheduling for an executive?

My rule of thumb is that if it's not on your calendar, it's not happening. Everything needs to go on the calendar. Appointments, travel itineraries, deadlines, event happenings, meetings as well as personal tasks/items. I recommend asking for access to their shared family calendar if they have one for ease of cross-checking evening/weekend events and travel.

Your calendar is going to be one of the most important tools you utilise as an administrator. It helps you stay organised, keep calm under pressure and help you better support your team. Be consistent. If you know you need to set aside time for an important task always put it in your calendar. If you need to arrange a meeting, use colour coding to help you identify internal and external meetings, and always book in time to set up and clear up. Also, communicate effectively with your team mates through your calendar. Send out calendar invites to managers or key contacts who will need to know when you will be on leave. If it shows in their diary there much more likely to remember.

Having a digital calendar is essential for effective scheduling, providing seamless creation, editing, and sharing of events with your executive and stakeholders. Integrating the calendar with your executive's email, phone, and other devices ensures accessibility from anywhere. Opt for a calendar app offering features like reminders, notifications, color-coding, and compatibility with various platforms. Popular options include Google Calendar, Outlook, and Calendly.

Find out what their desired working hours are. For example, if they get to work at 8am but like to have an hour to catch up on emails and required reading, block the time and call it "Emails/reading time." Do the same in the evening and leave a buffer at the end of the day if being home by a certain time is priority for your executive. During your weekly 1:1 go over the most urgent items and mark them as RED on the calendar or another color that associate with "DO NOT MOVE."

An essential aspect of optimizing scheduling is grasping your executive's priorities and limits. This involves identifying their critical and time-sensitive tasks, projects, and meetings, as well as those that can be delegated, postponed, or rejected. It also entails understanding the most suitable times and days for your executive to focus on work, communication, and meetings, as well as when they require blocks of time for personal or professional matters. By establishing clear priorities and boundaries, you can prevent over-scheduling, conflicts, and undue stress.

Weekly 1:1s are essential for building an efficient executive/executive assistant relationship. Make sure you touch base about calendar, upcoming travel, priorities, ask for feedback, and ask for mentorship in your professional goals. Even if you do this by chat, calendar time for this on a weekly basis. You may think "Their schedule is so busy, they don't have time for me" or "I'll cancel my meeting to fit this other one in." I promise you, the meeting with YOU is the most important one on their calendar for the week.

Calendly is great for meetings with 1:1 people, but make sure you are setting the parameters inside of the tool. Who can schedule, how many meetings per day of that type, etc. This can be tricky if your executive is running a large team and you want to have your finger on the pulse, so be careful with the Calendly link. Doodle is a great tool to use to get meeting availability across multiple executives.