Guest post by Dylan Kissane, founder of scriblr.fr (LinkedIn)
I’m an independent marketing consultant and I work with companies in the software and technology sectors in Europe and the US. Since striking out on my own I’ve experienced many challenges, from finding that elusive first client to building up a portfolio of work and turning one-off projects into monthly recurring revenue.
I’ve been lucky enough to work closely with my clients over a year or more, and the more closely I work with them the more I need to integrate into their existing IT systems. This means working within Microsoft Office for one client, Google Workspace for another, and even a combination of the two office platforms at others. I’m provided an email address at each company and it’s not difficult to switch from one office suite to the other, but there’s at least one point where things get frustrating: scheduling.
My Calendar Conundrum
Trying to schedule a meeting when you have at least three different calendars is a problem.
In my case, I had an Outlook Calendar at one client, a Google Calendar at another, and my own Google Calendar for my business. Keeping all of those calendars in sync was a major hassle and over the course of a year I tried a number of solutions:
- The Manual Sync: Every time I add something to my primary calendar, I would send meeting requests to block the time on the other two calendars. This worked great to block the time…but if an event shifted, I would need to remember to manually change the invite I had already sent.
- IFTTT and Zapier: I set up IFTTT recipes and Zapier zaps to try and keep my calendars in sync. When the recipes fired it worked well but sometimes they wouldn’t fire…and I only found out about the misfire when I found myself double booked.
- Automation: I used an automation service that managed to keep my calendars in sync, but I was limited in the number of ‘syncs’ that bot would complete each month, and the time between ‘syncs’ was at least an hour. My calendar (probably like yours) can sometimes move a lot faster than that.
As far as problems go, it wasn’t an enormous one, but it was consistently frustrating.
It seemed such a simple thing: why couldn’t I just keep my calendars in sync without having to send myself invites, second-guess myself, or pay more to achieve basic real-time alignment?
I was looking for a solution, and I found it in CalendarBridge.
Really Simple Scheduling with CalendarBridge
With CalendarBridge sync I could set up syncing so that my primary calendar was always up to date. If an event was added to my Office 365 calendar or a different Google calendar, it would instantly sync to the primary calendar. If the event shifted or was deleted, it was gone from my primary calendar, too. With two-way syncing, my clients could have visibility of my availability without having to move beyond their own internal scheduling tools.
With [CalendarBridge], my clients have visibility of my availability without having to move beyond their own internal scheduling tools.
Dylan kissane, founder of scriblr.fr
For just a few dollars a month I am less frustrated and more confident that the calendar I am looking at is the same one that my clients see, no matter what platform they are using. No more double booking, no more IFTTT recipes, and no more average automation: this is calendar syncing that just works.