<aside> <img src="/icons/info-alternate_yellow.svg" alt="/icons/info-alternate_yellow.svg" width="40px" /> This page is part of The Toolbox by Danny Smith.

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Even in distributed teams that work asynchronously, managing calendars is incredibly important. In an office, everyone knows that everyone else is there between 9am and 5pm – it's easy to book meetings at short notice, or grab someone for a quick coffee.

In a remote setting, things are a little different:

• People can be in different timezones – there may only be very small windows for synchronous meetings.
• People are free to schedule their time in a way that suits them – you may find some folks start work early or late. Some will head to the gym during the normal working day, have a long lunch with their family, or take a nap in the afternoon.
• Asynchronous working enables people to dedicate long stretches to uninterrupted work, where they'll often have notifications disabled.

To make this work, we need to be a little more disciplined with calendars than we would in an office. This lesson will look briefly at some of the things we can do that make calendaring work well.

Setting Things Up

There are three things we can do to make calendaring easier for us:

Expose your calendar

Other people should be able to subscribe to your calendar and see what you have on. This helps them decide when's best to book meetings with you. It's helpful if you expose the full details of your meetings (rather than just busy/free) so people can take a guess at the state of mind you're likely to be in.

Exposing an Outlook Calendar

Exposing an Outlook Calendar

Subscribe to other people's calendars