Scheduling Meetings You Have Repeatedly Using Outlook

You have a new weekly appointment with your manager because your career development is on her radar screen this year (that's a good thing!). That appointment is every Friday morning at 10am for 45 minutes. You want to populate your calendar for the next 6 months of meetings – thank goodness you're using Outlook because writing it on a paper calendar for 26 weeks would take you 20 minutes. With Outlook it will take you 20 seconds.  You're going to enter a recurring appointment. Here's how:

1. Go to your calendar in Outlook.
2. Create a new appointment (ctrl-n)
3. Complete the subject line with something like: Weekly Mtg. with Mgr.
4. Set the time for 10:00 ending at 11:00 just in case the meeting runs long.
5. Click on recurrence and complete the options in the box for frequency, start date, end date
6. Click OK
7. Save & close the new appointment
8. Look at the Fridays for the next few months and confirm that your manager meeting shows up on every one.

Some enhancements to setting this appointment that you might want to make:

• Color code the appointment so you can see at a glance that it's a meeting
• Invite your manager so her calendar is automatically populated when she accepts the invitation
• Set an alarm in advance of the meeting so you have time to prepare and get there a few minutes early
• Go to the next appointment and put the topics you want to discuss in the big block at the bottom of the appointment screen. This will be helpful when you have your meetings – to keep on track, and at your annual review because you will track what you've been discussing, accomplishing, and spending your time doing that your manager has a keen interest in tracking.

Comments

[Dan]

For keeping track of your repeating tasks, like meetings, you can use the checklists section from Gtdagenda.