How to Schedule Meetings When Traveling

Today’s tip is about managing a slate of meetings when you’re doing out-of-town travel.

Europa, a relatively mild-mannered member of the staff of the Green Growing Things plant stores, is secretly the overlord of the Eastern Bloc. While she normally manages her empire from afar using Facetime, every now and then there’s just no substitute for face time. She has spies to debrief, world leaders to intimidate, diplomats to blackmail, and operatives to set in motion. (She’s found that maintaining control works best when you can look someone in the eye, so they know you’re serious when you threaten to spank them in front of their direct reports. Remember this tip next time you have a team meeting. It will make things much more lively, and is a great way to get to experience the prison system from the inside.)

Being one of the most powerful people in the world is not without its challenges. For Europa, that’s scheduling. She has no personal assistant, so like it or not, she has to schedule her entire trip herself.

Use a Template to Schedule Travel

For starters, she has to meet the Minister of Not-so-Silly Walks, check in with Queen Elizabeth about an invitation to the wedding, and meet with her Under-minions in charge of Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. There are about a dozen others also on her list. She only has five vacation days from Green Growing Things and needs to organize all those dozens.

When you’re traveling and planning on a lot of meetings, make a template for yourself beforehand, for each of your travel days. Mark out any pre-scheduled travel, state functions, or mystical rituals that you know will happen at defined times and places. Then divide your remaining free time into time blocks for scheduling.

Block Out Regular Slots

My template for traveling to New York is a standard day template anchored by meetings held over meals, with other meetings in between. Each day is divided into breakfast, mid-morning, lunch, afternoon, dinner, post-dinner. Each of those becomes one time slot, around an hour to two hours, available for scheduling. 

Though it’s possible, time-wise, to fit more meetings than that into a day, seven meetings is more than enough to completely fill up almost anyone’s usable brain space. Unless the meetings are ceremonial or truly perfunctory, if you’re going to more than that in a day, you probably aren’t able to add much value after a couple. 

If an event needs to be longer than a single time block, just combine two time blocks into one. 

Create a Paper Template

You can create a template by grabbing a sheet of paper or a spreadsheet, and creating a grid. Label each column with a day you’ll be traveling. Label each row with a slot. In this case, Europa wisely decides to use my template. Her columns are labeled Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Her rows are labeled breakfast, mid-morning, lunch, afternoon, dinner, and post dinner. 

Using that template, in one day, Europa can fill in which meetings can go where. The Queen gets Monday breakfast, Minion Poland mid-morning, Minion Hungary for lunch, and Minion Romania for afternoon. She has a lot to discuss with the Minister of Not-so-Silly Walks, however, so she can allocate both dinner and after-dinner-drinks to her meeting with the Minister. 

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Factor in Travel Time

This is a schedule tidy enough for Mary Poppins at her most OCD. But as tidy as it all looks, Breakfast at Windsor Place and a mid-morning meeting in Warsaw isn’t feasible, thanks to transportation time. Sadly, auto companies are still refusing to release the patent for the instant teleportation machine that was invented in the 1950s using information obtained from UFOs in the U.S. Government’s Project Blue Book. So Europa may need to shift things around, and use her mid-morning time slot to take a supersonic helicopter from between meetings.

Collect, Then Schedule

Trying to sort all this out by having a dozen individual back-and-forth conversations would be impossible. The quickest way to sort it out is to collect everyone’s free time and figure out who can go in which block.

Using a template makes scheduling a full day easy.

Europa sends a quick note to all of her associates, asking them to tell her which time blocks are free. Then she goes to her grid and fills in the schedule with times that work for everyone. By having everything in one place, she can shuffle around appointments as needed to find the combinations that work for everyone. Once she's finalized the schedule, she writes everyone back telling them when she can meet. Sure, the Queen pushes back a little, but...this is Europa we're talking about. When she says "Jump," the Queen listens.

By centralizing the decision-making as much as possible, all the possible combinations of meetings and travel and travel time are available for her to use to fit everything into her schedule and still make it back to the hotel in time for her bubble bath. 

Whether you’re intimidating world leaders, or just checking on the status of your far-flung spy network, keeping your travel productive means making the best possible use of your time. Create a daily template and use it to schedule your meetings. Make sure to allow for travel time, and when possible, collect everyone else’s free time and put your schedule together using all that knowledge to come up with the best possible plan. 

I’m Stever Robbins. Follow GetItDoneGuy on Twitter and Facebook. Want great keynote speeches on productivity, Living an Extraordinary Life, or entrepreneurship? Hire me! Find me at http://SteverRobbins.com.