Tell me if this sounds familiar.
You're about to set up a meeting with someone, so you sent off an email, and you asked the following question: "Hey, can you meet with me this coming Tuesday?" And they reply back, saying, "Sorry, I've got another commitment. How about later on the same day? How about Tuesday afternoon?" And you received their email and say, "Mmm, sorry, I'm leaving work early that day. How about Wednesday? Wednesday afternoon?" To which they reply, "Nope, no can do. I've got another meeting at that time," and they suggest another time, and you suggest another time, and there's an awful lot of back and forth, back and forth as you try to find the ideal meeting time.
Well, today, I want to share with you a tool that is going to eliminate all of this back and forth, and it's called Assistant.to. You can find it at assistant.to, not .com, but assistant.to.
And what this Gmail add-on does is it helps you to not only invite someone to find the ideal time, but it actually creates that meeting for the both of you, all with just a single email.
Now, Assistant.to is only for Gmail users at this point if you want to create the invitation, but you can send this invitation to any user. It doesn't matter what the receiver is using. As long as you're using Gmail, you can use Assistant.to.
First steps, you'll need to install it, and Assistant.to comes as a Chrome extension, so it will be installed here in your browser. But let's go into our email. Let's see how it works here.
So I'm going to open up a new message. I'm going to find my test account here, and let's say I'm doing a new meeting. "Can we meet this week?" And I say, "Hi, Scott, looking forward to talking with you soon."
So at this point, I'd like to propose a few different times. You know, in the past, I may have suggested one time or two times, you know, just here in the description or just here in the subject of the email. But Assistant.to makes it so much easier.
At this point, I'm going to come down to the lower right-hand corner of my screen, and once you have Assistant.to installed as your extension, you're going to see this icon in the lower right-hand corner of the message that you're writing.
So I'm going to click on it, and what's going to happen is I'm going to see a new dialog box, which looks very, very similar to any calendar event or any other meeting that you may be setting up. We've got a title up here. It comes with sort of a stock title here. I'm going to change that. I'm going to say this is "Scott and Scott Chat."
Location: it is going to be phone-based, so I'm going to leave that there. Here, you can add one or more invitees, so I'm going to add the email address of the person that I'm sending it to. I could add additional ones if I wanted to as well. This is going to be helpful, so it adds it to their calendar as well.
And then, of course, we've got a description area where you can add phone numbers, maybe a link to your video conference, whatever else you'd like to include in the description.
Now, down below, we've got a snapshot of our calendar, and we can change the meeting length if we want. But the great thing about seeing your calendar is you can see the other commitments that are already on your calendar at that time.
So I'm going to push this out a few days. I'm going to look ahead at the following week, and I'm going to make a few suggestions. So all I need to do, with my 30-minute meeting length selected, is I'm going to select a few possible times.
I'm going to say 10:00 a.m. on Tuesday. I'm going to say 9:00 a.m. on Wednesday. And also, let's drag that one down, 2:00 p.m. on Wednesday. And then I'm also going to suggest 10:00 a.m. on Thursday. So I've got four different times that I'm available, and I'm hoping that that's going to be enough variety for the person that I'm sending it to.
So at this point, with all the information filled in and a few different choices, I'm going to select "Insert Times into Email," and what happens is you can see I've got a little bit of additional text here. It automatically adds this line in: "I'd like to set up a 30-minute meeting. Click on the meeting start time that works for you."
This is text-based, so if you'd like to alter this or change this, you certainly can. But down below, now we've got some clickable options for the person receiving this email, and the great thing is that they can take a look at this, make their selection, and immediately you will be notified, and it will also be added to your calendar.
So I'm happy with this here. All I have to do next is select "Send."
And now, let's go back into my test account here. It might take just a few seconds for me to receive that email. This is who I sent it to.
There we go. "Can we meet this week?" I'm going to open up this email, and this is what it looks like to the person receiving it, just like what we saw when we created it. So I can take a browse down here and say, "Well, I'm busy Tuesday. I'm away for a conference on Wednesday. Hey, Thursday at 10 a.m., that works for me."
So the receiver clicks on the link, clicks on their selected time, and look at that—it gives me a confirmation. "You're all set. You've successfully scheduled a meeting. Here are the details."
I can always select a different time—maybe I made a mistake, or maybe I'd like to change it. I can always select a different time, but I've confirmed, I've selected that meeting time.
Let's go back now to our original email, right? This is the person who has sent it, and this is what we receive. Assistant.to gives us a confirmation email telling us that that person has selected a meeting time, and here's the bonus: it's been added to your calendar.
So now if I go to November 16th, look at that—here is that invitation. It has been added directly to my calendar, all with a single email. So I've got all of the details: if I added a description, phone, the title of my meeting—it's all here. Here's the person that I've invited.
And Assistant.to will also add an additional link here, so if I want to reschedule, if I need to make some changes, I can always select this link, and the receiver will also have this link, so if they want to make a change, they can do so as well.
Speaking of which, let's go back to the receiver. Let's see what happens on their end. Let's go back to their inbox, and they receive an invitation from me, almost as if I had gone and created this meeting invite, right? This looks just like a regular meeting invitation. Do I accept? Am I tentative? Am I going to decline? But I really haven't done any of this; Assistant.to has done all of the work for me, all from that single email. I gave it some options, I gave the meeting details, and all the receiver had to do was select one time, and now we are all set.
I've got that meeting in my calendar, they can select "Accept," they will now have the meeting in their calendar, and we are ready to go.
So I would suggest you take a look at Assistant.to. It reduces so much of the back and forth, back and forth, as you are trying to find the ideal meeting time with the person that you are wanting to meet with.
Again, Assistant.to is only for Gmail users if you want to be able to invite people, but anyone can receive Assistant.to invitations. As you saw in my example, I was using Outlook.com as the person who received it, so it doesn't matter who you're sending it to—they can take advantage of this functionality.
So try out Assistant.to and let me know how it goes. Maybe you're already using Assistant.to. I'd love to hear your experience in the comments below.
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Remember, being productive doesn't need to be difficult; in fact, it's very simple.
