Favorite Fridays: Schedule meetings with Tungle

This is the first of my Favorite Friday posts in which I’ll share my favorite technology tools and how I use them.

I am a self-professed geek when it comes to technology and while its true that some things excite me just because they’re bright, shiny and new, what really gets me revved up  is technology which serves a purpose and which I can use to work more efficiently, live more simply and generally improve the quality of my life.  I find that my favorite tools tend to fall into one of three categories:

1. Efficiency: These are all the things which help me organize my life and my work.  They solve problems. They save me time on essential daily tasks, allow me to organize and find information quickly and painlessly, and generally move me closer to  being able to manage and meet the many demands of my life easily and effortlessly.
2. Communication: These tools allow me to be in contact with the people and organizations I care about. They also enable me to meet new people, learn new things and constantly expand my horizons.
3. Passion: These are tools which are related to my favorite hobbies and activities.  They offer new and exciting ways to immerse myself in my many passions while perhaps connecting me with other like-minded people.

There is often overlap as some tools serve multiple functions. Either way I’m a big fan of  “appropriately useful” technology.  Unlike some people I don’t believe that technology is cutting us off from living, simple joyful lives of connection to other people and the natural world. In fact I think that when used the right way technology can actually free us up to spend more time doing just that.  The trick is in consciously selecting tools that work for our lives and offer one or all of the 3 benefits I mentioned.

Today’s Fave Tool is one that I just started using and falls into the efficiency category.

Meet Tungle (www.tungle.com) a nifty website which allows you to schedule meetings without the usual frustrating flurry of back and forth emails and calls  from multiple people trying to find a date and time when everyone is available.

How Tungle Works:  The basics

Go to Tungle.com,  initiate an new meeting, invite people by entering their e-mail addresses, select some proposed times and hit send.

Tungle does the rest. The invitees will receive an e-mail message directing them to a page where they can select which of the proposed times work for them.  Once everyone picks a time, Tungle books the meeting on the date and time which works for everyone.

How Tungle works: The extras

While you can use Tungle without having an account, a nice benefit of an account (which is free) is that you can link it to and synchronize with your calender software. I use Google Calendar, but it also works with Outlook and a couple of other email clients.

When I add an appointment to my calendar and mark it as busy, Tungle automatically marks that time as unavailable.

Likewise, as soon as Tungle successfully books a meeting it immediately enters it into my Google calendar and sends me an email to let me know that the meeting has been successfully booked.

An account also gets you a  Tungle page , which enables other people to view your availability and initiate appointments with you.  Check mine out here.

My conclusion

The best thing about Tungle is that you can book appointments with people regardless of what  email/calendering software they are using . Tungle has simplified the way I make appointments.  I no longer have to spend time wading through e-mails from 4 or 5 people in order to figure out who’s available when.

According to the team at Tungle, scheduling appointments the way most people do requires an average of 7 communications. If you Tungle your appointments instead, the average drops to 1.6 communications. Seems hard to argue with potentially saving the time it would take you to write  5.4 e-mails.

So… are you ready to Tungle?

Learn more

Visit the Tungle website and try it out:

Check out this brief video demo of Tungle to see it in action