How to Make a Professional Schedule

Many professionals' schedules are now maintained online.

Creating a professional schedule can have numerous benefits; it enables you to streamline the process for receiving appointments, enables interested parties to quickly discern when you'll be available and enables you to stay reminded and up-to-date about your activities for each day. Before the schedule can be used, several important elements need to be decided and incorporated.

Instructions

1. Decide how detailed the schedule should be. Think about whether you'd like the schedule to strictly include professional appointments, or whether you'd like to include personal activities within it as well (for example, listing when you normally attend the gym). If you plan to make your schedule publicly viewable, you should consider how this could potentially create privacy concerns.

2. Brainstorm how new appointments can be added to the schedule, and who is permitted to do this. Online professional schedules can either allow anyone to add appointments to your calendar, or instead can just give this ability to a few selected individuals.

3. If your interoffice email is on Outlook, consider managing your calendar from there. Colleagues can schedule meetings, arrange conference rooms and send invites. Click on the "Calendar" tab in your email and add events.

4. If you work outside of a regular office environment, use Google calendar to create your schedule. Go to google.com/calendar and create a new calendar account. Once you've done this, you can begin to add appointments and set up reminders about upcoming events. To enable other people to make amendments to the calendar, select "Settings" in the top-right corner, and then select "Calendar settings." Navigate to the "Calendars" tab, and select "Edit Settings" underneath the "Sharing" heading. At this point, you'll be able to give people permission to make changes to and amend the schedule.

5. Make the schedule publicly viewable if appropriate. This option can be selected on the same option screen as discussed in Step 3.

References

• Boise State University: 40 Quick Tips for Using Google Calendar