Using FINDTIME to VOTE on a Meeting Schedule

July 19, 2021 Nestor Reyes

Hi Heroes!

If you are tired of back and forth emails trying to arrange a meeting between people, whether from the same organization or from different organizations, either because they don’t use their calendar properly or you don’t have access to see what their available slots are then this is the add-in that you need to have into your outlook.

FindTime

This add-in is called FINDTIME

FindTime is an add-in that works both for the Outlook Desktop and Outlook Web versions, and essentially it creates a survey/poll for the attendees, with proposed times and dates for the meeting. Instead of back and forth emails with proposed schedules and times, you just send the options and upon voting and upon reaching a consensus, the meeting is scheduled automatically. Best of all, it is completely FREE.

How to install it?

The first thing that we need to do is to go into your Outlook and go to get Add-ins. Search for FindTime and install it. After you have Findtime installed into your outlook you will have the button available on the top of your Home tab on the action ribbon.

How to use it?

Whenever you select a message and you want to use FindTime, you can click on reply with meeting poll (directly clickin on the FindTime button), or replying to the message and then clicking on the FindTime button. It will show you a list of different options, dates and times and the availability of the people that you can have the availability for that were included as recipients in the email.

Select the options, including duration, and proposed dates (times and dates, no limit on how many options) and you can either leave the option for an online meeting (the service used will be the one set by default on your company Admin, either MS Teams or Skype) or Type a location (meeting room).

In further settings, you can choose to either be notified about the updates, automatically schedule the meeting when attendees reach a consensus, to hold selected times on your calendar (this will hold all the different options than you marked as busy on your calendar), etc.

After you’ve selected all the options and clicked on OK, an invitation poll is automatically added to the body of your email. Once you send it, the attendees will can click on the body of the email to see the meeting options and they will be taken into a website where they have to select their name and then they will vote on which one of the different timeslots they prefer.

Depending on the preferences that you set on the meeting poll, once all attendees have voted you will receive an email indicating that the voting has concluded. If you selected the option to automatically send a time once a consensus is reached, then you will receive an email with the consensus of the poll and automatically you would also receive the calendar invitation with the online meeting.

This is a great tool to use, specially if you are trying to arrange meetings with people outside of your organization, because you cannot have access to check their availability.

PRO TIP: Try to minimize the number of choices to 2 or 3, in different days. The fewer options you use, the higher chances you have for the attendees to pick a slot.