How to Optimize Meetings | Save Time with This 8 Minutes Strategy

Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another video. Today I want to talk about one of my favorite tools that I use to run a business. It's a tool called TimeTrade, and it helps me plan all of my meetings. So if it's an in-person meeting or if it's a, uh, by-phone meeting, I love the system. It saves me lots of time. So if I go to TimeTrade here, this is my page of my favorite tools. I'll load this one up and tell you a little bit about why I like it and how I use it, and hopefully there's some applications for you to use it in your business as well. So this is the page. I'm going to log in so you can see more what it looks like on the backend if you do end up getting it as an account. Now I signed up for the paid version of this, but I'll show you kind of what it goes through. So what it is, it connects to your calendar. So for me, it says here it's connected to my Google Calendar, and it looks for spots that I have open in my calendar. And will help me book meetings and phone calls when I want to set it up. So I use it for setting up coffee times, phone calls, and also I do some salsa lessons for people who are competing in salsa competitions. So I'll talk mostly about the coffee and phone call because that relates to my business. So what it does is— so I can click on coffee appointment with Evan, for example. What it does is it allows me to book 60 minutes of time, in-person meeting. It tells people where they're gonna go, so it's a Starbucks at this location. So I have all my meetings at this location, people come to me to meet, to help save on my travel time, and also helps me do back-to-back meetings. And I have people enter in why are we meeting. So it's important because if we booked a time in advance and we have a meeting, you know, 3 weeks later, I'll probably forget what's going on. So it enables them to enter that information in, which is great. It allows me to book 8 weeks in the future, and I can change all this. And it tells me how much time I have available. So when you're setting one of these up, you can call it whatever you want. This is what people will see. And you have to tell them kind of where you're going if it's going to be an in-person meeting. And if you click on the appointment availability, this is what allows you to integrate with your calendar. So for me, I don't have that many time slots available. I try not to do meetings in general, meetings or phone calls. I try to avoid them because it can be a huge time suck. But when I do do them, it's usually Thursday afternoon. So I have 2 spots open potentially for people who want to do coffee meetings here that's potentially available if they're not already taken up. And then I'll use the same spots for phone calls. It allows me to get all my meetings done in one chunk of time, so I can be extra productive on that and can go from one meeting to another, or one meeting to a phone call, back to another meeting, whatever we want. So it'll basically look at my calendar, and if I don't have anything booked for this time, it'll give it as an option for people who want to book a time with me. If you want to see an example of what it looks like, I can click here as a link, and this is the link that you would then be able to send people. And so when people want to meet with me, they'll get this link and it'll show them basically the time spots that I have open and the information that they need to put in. So it'll say you're scheduling, uh, this is for a phone call up to 30 minutes. I always call people instead of them calling me because I'm always on time and often people are not. And if you only have 30 minutes in time, you want to make sure that you use it productively. So that starts with making the phone call on time. So I can click Check Availability. It'll show me the dates that are open. So I say, okay, I want to talk with Evan on, you know, the 19th, and it shows you the different times that are open. So you can click one, you can go next. It'll say, "What number should I dial you?" So you can say, "Okay, my number is whatever it is," because I always do the phone calling, so I need to make sure I have their number. "What are we discussing?" So again, you have to enter in what it is that you want to talk about, and you have to enter in this information here, otherwise it doesn't allow you to move forward. If this was a meeting, it would tell you the address and where we're actually going to be meeting, and if you want, you can even throw in a map if you want, or a picture of yourself. Say, "Here's what I look like." and that kind of information you can include in there as well. So this is super helpful. What I also really like about it is that it'll send people a reminder the day before saying, "Just a reminder, you have a call with Evan tomorrow at 3 o'clock," or "You're meeting Evan at this Starbucks at 3 o'clock tomorrow," so that they remember. So again, if you're booking, I allow people to book up to 8 weeks out, so if you're booking in advance, you know, something might come up, you forget about it, so it's good to have that reminder that's automatically built in so I'm not following up with people myself to say, hey, just a reminder, we're meeting tomorrow. Then what I can do on my admin side, I'll get an email every time somebody books an appointment and it automatically puts it into my calendar system so I can see it pop up automatically there for me, and it has all that information of why we're meeting, what number I'm calling, link to their website, etc. You can enter in more criteria if you want to have that. I try to keep it minimal, but if you have more specific criteria that you want people to enter in, you can put that in there too. You can then look at your appointment inbox. You can see who you have meetings coming up with. So I have a meeting with John and Arthur coming up. I can click on it for details if I want. For phone calls, again, I can click on and see who I have coming up. So it's a phone call. Again, I can click on it. So what are we discussing? It's a 20-minute interview. So it's good, you know, I may not recognize the name, and then I can see that, oh, it's an interview and there are questions attached. So that's great for me to be able to prepare for that in advance of the call. So details of the appointment you can click on and it will show, okay, it's a 20-minute interview, Pete Performance as an entrepreneur, sample questions, etc. So I'll have all this information automatically in my calendar system so then when it pops up I know what we're talking about, I remember why we're setting this call up and it really helps me kind of be prepared. This is all stuff I used to do, keep notes, very time-consuming, and I love using a system to help me kind of manage all that myself. The next thing I do is if I want to send an email, you can just send out that link. So I use Gmail, but you can do it through Outlook or whatever, you know, your main email program is as well. If you want to send an email out to somebody, you'll see something like this pop up. I use canned responses, so what I'll do if somebody wants to set up a phone meeting with me, for example, I will go down here and say, "Hi John, we should talk," and then I'll do canned response, phone meeting, and here's a link to my schedule so we can plan a time. Remove that, and then if he clicks on that link, he'll be able to schedule time to talk with me. And so I find that to be super helpful for him, and you don't have to remember what what exactly that whole long link is yourself. If you use Outlook, you can do it as custom signatures, which I used to do before moving to Gmail, and then, you know, just put the email address in and send away. So it saved me a ton of time in being able to, you know, book appointments, keep me on track, let me know what's coming up. It reminds them before the meeting that it's happening again, and it's great for them to pick a time that is convenient for them, and I know it's convenient for me instead of having to go back and forth and say, well, how about this day or this day or this day. So I find it super helpful, saving me time, and when I only have such limited time to actually talk to people and meet with people, it's helpful to be able to have a system that saves us all a whole bunch of time. So that's what I use. It's a 30-day free trial to help you kind of get into it and see if you like it. I got hooked through my 30 days, and it ends up being $30 a year. If you want to sign up for it, and that's the Professional Edition that you see here that I'm using. It's all the same functionality, your 30 days just limits you after 30 days. So definitely a huge time saver, definitely worth the $30 a year, and I find it extremely helpful for my business. So hopefully you guys, if you haven't heard of it, can check it out. If you guys like the video, I'd love to see some thumbs up below if you want to leave one, and I also would love to hear if you have any comments or what you guys use, or if you like this video if you want to leave a comment underneath. So thank you and stay tuned for the next episode.