I think everyone by now knows how I feel about meetings. Certainly they can be very painful to sit through when they are unnecessary, and I think most of us need to cut down on how many we hold.

But one of the biggest issues I have with meetings is actually just to do with organising them. Because I go into a lot of different businesses, I see a lot of methods for arranging meetings. If I’m lucky, they include something like Outlook, and people in the business keep their calendars up to date. If I’m not, then I can look forward to long email conversations trying to arrange a date.

Naturally, this gets harder and harder as the number of people involved increases. Add in people external to the business, and then even the Outlook calendar can’t help you. I can’t even begin to calculate the hours and hours I’ve wasted trying to arrange simple meetings…

Happily, I’ve come across something which gets rid of most of the pain. Doodle is a great service that takes the pain out of scheduling meetings.

It works by letting you give a choice of days and times when you are able to have the meeting. Then it creates a poll, which you can either email as a link to all participants yourself, or even just enter their email addresses and allow Doodle to do that. Each participant is then able to go and select which times they can make.

When everyone has chosen, you get an email telling you, and can go and look what time is best – Doodle will tell you which is the most popular time. Then you can email everyone to confirm the specific time.

No more email tennis, no more phonecalls trying to track down a time everyone can do. Just a nice, simple interface to solve this annoying problem!

Even better, Doodle can interface with very many calendar applications, and if you can’t do it automatically, will even email you a little file which will add the meeting into your calendar.

Doodle is free to use, though it will show you ads. There are also ‘premium’ accounts that have various features, which are well worth considering. The “Solo” version is only €22 / $29, and, frankly, there have been times when I’d gladly have paid that just to get one meeting sorted out…

If you’ve ever felt the frustration of trying to get just a few people to agree on a time and date, check out Doodle. It will make life so much simpler!