These tools and easy tricks can help anyone master their schedule

Before I worked on a remote team, I was a freelancer and never needed to collaborate with teams very much. The way I used my calendar back then was pretty basic—maybe a birthday here and there.

But when I joined Buffer in 2015 that suddenly changed. The more I grew as an engineer and the more I leaned into leadership and ultimately transitioned into management, the more I noticed how essential calendar management is.

Here are the ways I’ve worked to master my calendar. I hope they might help you, too.

In almost every distributed team, whether a portion of your colleagues are in an office or you don’t have an office at all, there will be people you don’t see every day, at least physically.

So how can you know if someone in your team is “in the office” and/or actually available?

Calendars are an essential tool for checking availability at Buffer, whether you want to book a call with someone, or just check if they are “at work” that day.

With our company’s transparent culture, individuals’ email and calendars are visible to anyone in the company. For example, if I want to book a call with a fellow EM at Buffer, I’ll go to their Google Calendar and check to see when they are available.

Or let’s say I have a doctor’s appointment next Friday at 9:30 am. How would my team know about it? I could write an email or put it in our chat tools, but that will soon drown in other messages, and people won’t know about it when booking a meeting with me. If I put it on my calendar, the information is right where it needs to be.

I schedule everything, even breaks

While working in distributed teams you will very likely also work with different time zones. Since I’m in Europe, in order for me to chat with someone on the U.S. West Coast, I have to stay on a bit longer in my afternoon. My work schedule generally looks like this:

9:00 am to 12:30 pm work
12:30pm to 3:00pm break
3:00pm to 7:00pm work

It’s important to take breaks, and to make these breaks visible to my team, I put a “block” event on my calendar on weekdays to show them that I am not available (except for emergencies, of course).

These tools make it easy to collaborate

There are a lot of different tools and settings that have helped me when scheduling meetings, planning research calls, letting people know that I am out of office, etc.

Scheduling meetings

Calendly is an essential tool for us at Buffer, and it has helped me a ton with scheduling meetings both internally and outside of Buffer.

I love that you can define exactly the range of the day when people can book a meeting with you. As long as your calendar is up to date, the tool automatically only shows the available slots to the person booking the call.