Doodle: A No-Nonsense Scheduling Tool

Posted by Alison Aldrich on September 24th, 2008 Posted in: Technology
Tags: doodle, meetings, scheduling

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Thanks to Doodle fan Lisa Oberg for suggesting this topic.

E-mail. Most of your contacts use it all the time, but that doesn’t mean it’s the best tool for every job. Let’s say you need to schedule a meeting for a group of people who don’t share a common calendaring system. You could ask each invited person to e-mail you with dates and times when they are available. You would then need to manage numerous incoming messages to find the best time to meet. Depending on the number of invitees, this could turn into quite a chore. Next time, try Doodle instead.

Doodle is a simple web-based application for scheduling meetings and creating polls.  It works with your e-mail, so you can use Doodle without signing up for a separate Doodle account. To create a meeting proposal, enter a title, description, and several suggested meeting times. Doodle will send you two e-mail messages. The first message contains a link you can use to modify the meeting proposal. The second message contains a link for you to forward to your list of invitees. Instead of replying directly to you, your invitees visit a web page where they enter their names and indicate which meeting times work best for them.  The result is a clear, easy-to-interpret table showing the group’s availability:

Doodle is also available as a Facebook application.