Have you ever woken up to find that someone schedule a surprise 6:00 am meeting with you? I have, and it sucks. Don’t get me wrong, 6:00 am meetings are fine when I know about them in advance. I just don’t want to find out about a meeting during my first sip of coffee. This is bad enough as a full-time employee, but can be costly for freelancers or business owners. That’s the quandary I found myself in.
I use Calendly for scheduling and anyone can schedule time with me between 6:00 am and 8:00 pm by clicking a time slot on my Calendly page. Very convenient for them and me. We never have to go back and forth to find good meeting times. Yet, I always worry that the one day I’ll wake up later than normal and find out I missed an early meeting. So, I send new meeting notifications to my phone, which of course, means I get text messages throughout the night. Not great for sleep quality. There must be a solution.
Calendly is already hooked up to my Office 365 calendar. No one can schedule meetings during times I already have a meeting. With Zapier, I created a zap that runs at 7:00 pm each night and creates a 6:00 am — 9:00 am meeting the next morning. Now my calendar has that time blocked off and I will not wake up to any surprise meetings. I also set a do-not-disturb schedule on my phone. No more notifications throughout the night.
Great technology offers simple solutions to the problems we face. In this case, five-minutes on Zapier literally improved my sleep and reduced stress in my life. If you are not using Zapier, you should be. If you are, let us know your favorite zaps in the comments.
