Setting up meeting times via email

I have had some renewed frustration recently with colleagues using email to pick meeting times for a group of people. I have found tools like Meet-o-matic to be much more useful for this and today after reading an academic paper on the topic of Computer Mediated Communication, I understand more clearly why.

To summarize, because of the time lag on email it is important to batch or streamline the process from everyone talking to find a mutually acceptable date to a model where a range of options is provided and everyone responds to a single source that gathers the information and then either informs the group of the best choice or upon failure offers a new range of dates. The web site http://meetomatic.com/ does exactly this and tends to work well for most situations. A person can also do the same role as Meet-o-matic by emailing a range of choices, gathering, then informing. Of course, online calendars from group members can help too!

Excerpt from “Support for Decisions by E-mail” by Jacob Palme

Problem: Interaction time (the time from a statement to a response) is in e-mail usually 6-48 hours, while the interaction time in face to face meetings is usually seconds or minutes only. This means that processes, which require many interactions, will take longer time through e-mail. In a face-to-face meetings, people can keep their attention on the same issue during the whole discussion, while in e-mail, they will do other things inbetween.

Solution: In some cases, this can be solved with a different algorithm. A simple example is the booking of the time for a future meeting. With face-to-face meetings, the usual algorithm is as follows:

1. Someone proposes at date for the next meeting.
2. Everyone else checks if this date is acceptable.
3. If the date is not acceptable to someone, that person proposes a different date.
4. Back to step 2 until a date is found, which is acceptable to everyone.

With e-mail, this algorithm will not work at all. With 6-48 hours loop time it may take weeks to schedule a time for a meeting. Instead, another algorithms may be used:

1. One person proposes five alternative dates, and asks everyone to reply to that person personally, indicating which of the dates are acceptable to them.
2. The proposing person collects the responses, checks which dates suites the largest number of people, and schedules the meeting for that date.
3. If none of the suggested dates are good enough, back to step 1.

The second algorithm is much faster, because usually only one loop is neccessary. Important differences and similarities:

* With both algorithms, the goal is to find a date suitable to all or most of the participants.
* With both algorithms, the actual decision is not made automatically by some computer process. The decision is made by one or several people, aided by data collected by the computer.
* The human decision process in the face-to-face process sometimes can include that someone says “hold the meeting without me” or “well, OK, I will reschedule my other commitment for the proposed date”. With the e-mail variant, such additional factors are also taken into account, but sometimes by the chair alone, which decides “we will have to hold the meeting without Johnson this time”.