How to Do Calendar Management as a Virtual Assistant: Tips and Tools

As a virtual assistant, managing calendars is one of your main responsibilities. If you’re a beginner, there’s a good chance you might be struggling with this task a lot.

Even though it doesn’t sound like much work, once you’re responsible for keeping track of all meetings, schedules, and appointments, you know how much of a hassle it is.

Calendar management includes a wide range of tasks and responsibilities that a VA has to carry out sing-handedly.

This includes preparing precise meeting schedules with clear start and end times, utilizing and operating calendar management tools for efficient processes, prioritizing tasks and allocating time slots, keeping track of deadlines, integrating with project and business management tools, emails, or other software, and so much more.

Well, it’s time you start working smarter rather than harder. There are several ways to manage the calendar efficiently and save valuable time. Once you know the hacks to do it, calendar management will become one of your least concerns. And that’s exactly what we’re here to help you with.

So, let’s get started!

What Core Skills Do You Need for Calendar Management

Managing calendars is not only about recording and notifying about the dates and schedules. It’s so much more than that. Doing it proficiently isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. There are several essential calendar management skills that a VA should have to become seasoned in calendar management. Most importantly:

Understanding Client Needs

As a virtual assistant, you’re supposed to play as a bridge between the client and the stakeholders. Always keep the client’s needs and convenience as a top priority. Try to adjust other schedules to match the client’s requirements. Don’t make the client change their preferred schedule for any internal meetings of the company, and notify them on the platforms on which they are more active.

Mastering Calendar Software

When you have the responsibility of tracing all the important dates and deadlines of a largely functional company, managing the calendar manually will be super stressful. Besides, you’ll be more likely to make mistakes. That’s why the professional way to handle this problem is to use several digital calendar software. The more you learn about different calendar software and features, the more you become an expert in managing calendars.

Scheduling and Booking Knowledge

Scheduling and booking require knowledge of different sites and processes. For example, if you’re required to book flights or a meeting at a hotel, you need to have proper knowledge about the sites or agencies that can get you the reservation. You need to follow multiple sources so you can get the best deals and services.

Prioritization and Time Management

The major troubleshooting you will have to face as VA during calendar management is clashes. Sometimes, your two important clients may prefer the same slots for a meeting. Again, an important event date might get collided with a client meeting. At those times, you need to know how to utilize your time management skills to manage time and prioritize one before the other based on urgency, cruciality, and other depending factors.

Communication and Follow-Up

After you schedule a meeting or client commitment, just notifying everyone about it isn’t enough. You need to follow up periodically to know whether everyone received your notification and will be present at the meeting. While you keep track of the dates and deadlines, it’s also your responsibility to communicate with the authorities about the lineups.

How to Manage Calendars Efficiently: Specific Scenarios & Tasks

Now, let’s get to the details. You know there have been instances when you felt completely lost managing the calendars and badly needed a bit of guidance to get out of the situation. You don’t want to face it again. So, let’s dig deeper into such scenarios that require some critical calendar management:

1. Managing Multiple Calendars

Managing multiple calendars is quite a baffling task. Doing it manually can simply make you go crazy. Using the right tools or software, this troubling task can get much simpler.

For example, suppose you’re dealing with ten clients. All clients have multiple transactions. Each transaction has a number of schedules for different events of the deal’s process, starting from meetings to demos to legal processing. So, you have to open multiple calendars to keep track of all the dates for different clients and manage them.

Here, tools like Google Calendar and Outlook can be super useful. They can help you integrate all different calendars together on your computer calendar and give you real-time reminders of each upcoming commitment beforehand. They can also help connect email, social media, and CRMs with your calendar to notify clients and other stakeholders automatically.

Generating multiple calendars in Google Calendar

Merging multiple calendars in Outlook

2. Handling Complex Scheduling Conflicts

Along with dealing with multiple calendars, VAs often have to handle complex schedules that conflict with other schedules of the client. The key to solving this issue is clear communication with the clients.

For example, suppose a client has multiple meetings scheduled within a short time frame. Communicate with the client and ask them to reschedule it for another day. Or else you can discuss it with the other parties involved to figure out an alternative time slot that works for everyone.

Another very effective way to handle complex scheduling conflicts is by creating an availability chart and sharing it with the clients. So that your clients can be mindful of the time slots available for a commitment before making one.

When scheduling conflicts take place, always put the high-priority activities before non-core functions. Don’t make any decisions on your own. Always discuss with your clients and ask them what’s more important to them.

Availability Chart

3. Setting up Recurring Meetings and Events

Many a time, your clients might have recurring meetings and events that take place weekly, monthly, or yearly. Among so many urgent schedules and deadlines piled up over these recurring events, you can easily miss them out. Well, not if you use calendar tools like Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar.

Suppose your client is participating in a course or presenting in a series of weekly seminars. You need to recall and notify your client about the course/ seminar a day earlier so that he can prepare for it. What you can do is go to Google Calendar or Outlook and select “New Event,” write the name of the event, and set the required frequency, i.e., daily, weekly, or monthly.

The last thing you’ll do is share that event with your client’s email using the “Share” option in the software. That’s it. Now, the software will notify both you and your client at the same time, reducing half of your hard work.

Setting up recurring meetings in Google Doc

Setting up recurring meetings in Google Doc

4. Coordinating Travel Arrangements

Managing travel arrangements for your clients involves more than just calendar dealings. It requires communicating with the client and knowing their needs and preferences to make arrangements accordingly. Other than that, knowing about the intent of the visit, so that booking flights, hotel, transportation, and other arrangements are made in coordination with the occasion or event venue.

For example, suppose one of your clients is going to a conference next week. You need to book tickets for flights, hotels, and transportation based on the conference venue and the client’s preference. You need to make sure every booking is confirmed timely. Share all the information details, documents, and important contact information with your client in a well-organized and traceable manner.

Organize all the travel details into a clear itinerary.  This should include arrival and departure times of flights, gate numbers, car or transport numbers, planned activities, appointments, a list of necessary addresses, and so on.

Sample Itinerary

5. Managing Appointments for Different Time Zones

In most cases, a virtual assistant being remote, their time zones are different from those of their clients. The conventional way of dealing with this difference is keeping a clock set in their time zone. But when you have multiple clients, how many clocks will you keep? Use time zone converter tools instead.

Suppose your client, a busy business owner who lives in Los Angeles, has a business meeting next Sunday at 12:00 pm. You, living in New York, need to schedule it on your calendar. In this case, all you need to do is use a calendar tool with a time zone converter like Google Calendar or WorldTimeBuddy. The software will convert the time and schedule it in your time zone on your side and your client’s time zone on his side.

This will help you prevent any confusion with time zones and their conversion. The time zone converter tool will handle that.

Setting up time zones in Google Doc

Setting up time zones in WorldTimeBuddy

6. Filtering and Categorizing Appointments

A proficient virtual assistant is always organized. The more precisely you arrange the calendar, the lesser the chances of any mismanagement or missed deadlines. Filtering and categorizing the appointments are a vital part of organizing your calendar.

For example, most of your clients have different types of appointments scheduled, such as meetings, client calls, or deadlines. Schedule each of these types as a different category. This way, you will have all meetings under one category and all calls and deadlines under their respective categories. Just make sure you are consistent with the names of the categories to avoid confusion.

Other than that, for communication-related appointments, you can use email management techniques like folder creation, email filters, and labeling. Review schedules periodically to make adjustments and updates as needed. Keep everything organized and up-to-date.

Tools and Resources You Can Utilize for Calendar Management

Until now in this article, you’ve learned about only a handful of tools and resources that can be used to manage calendars as a VA. But those aren’t the only tools you can utilize for efficient calendar management. Below, we jotted down a few based on their types:

Calendar Management Software

Calendar management tools are like digital assistants to virtual assistants for calendar management. It helps the VAs manage the calendar efficiently by centralized calendar management systems, reducing their trouble keeping track of loads of dates together.

With the help of these tools, VAs can easily manage their client’s busy schedules, including booking appointments, setting reminders, coordinating across multiple time zones, and ensuring timely attendance at actual meetings.

Some of the most popular calendar management services are:

• Google Calendar
• Outlook
• Calendly
• Acuity Scheduling

Scheduling Tools

While the calendar management tools are there to manage and update your calendar, scheduling tools are similar but more focused on scheduling and booking appointments based on availability. Therefore, many calendar management software come with scheduling tools. Such as the Google Calendar, Calendly, and Acuity Scheduling.

However, other software like Doodle helps find meeting times that are convenient for everyone by polling, Slack for integrating communication channels with the calendar, and Asana for assigning tasks and tracking deadlines.

To summarize, the most popular tools for scheduling respectively are:

• Calendly
• Google Calendar
• Doodle
• Slack
• Asana
• Trello

Time Zone Converters

As discussed a while ago, time zone converters are used to convert time and adjust it to the calendar of communicating parties from different time zones. That means if you are from Asia and your clients are from the USA and the UK, setting schedules in your calendar and sharing them with your clients will automatically convert the time to their respective time zones.

Along with calendar management and scheduling, Google Calendar also contains an integrated time zone converter. Other than Google Calendar, the most popular time zone converter is World Time Buddy.

Productivity Apps

As the name suggests, productivity apps are software that helps enhance the overall productivity of a VA’s work. These tools are specialized to help you stay organized, manage administrative tasks efficiently, and communicate effectively by project tracking, note-taking, cloud storage, virtual meetings, and document sharing.

Besides effective organization, some productivity apps are also used to ensure password safety and overall security from cyber crimes and thefts. Grammar checkers, writing enhancers, and polishing software are also part of productivity apps.

Some of the best and most heavily used productivity apps are:

• Asana
• Trello
• Google Workspace
• Slack
• Evernote
• Zoom
• RescueTime
• LastPass
• Grammarly

Templates and Checklists

Several online tools have pre-designed templates and checklists to save you the valuable time and effort required to design the checklist or schedule tables. They have different categories and formatting options for you to modify per your needs. You can easily generate interactive checklists, animation, and meeting notes with the help of these apps.

Some of the top software and tools for templates and checklists are:

• Trello
• Asana
• Canva
• SafetyCulture

Best Practices and Tips for Proficient Calendar Management

Efficient calendar management doesn’t only depend on your skills and the tools you use. Your daily routine, habits, and practices, too, are also crucial in maintaining calendars professionally and optimally. So, here are some of the practices you should adopt to become proficient in managing calendars as a VA:

• Set precise meeting schedules with fixed durations by calculating and predicting the time based on the agenda of the meeting.
• Use the Pomodoro technique, which is a method for effective time management by utilizing small shifts of work and rest to break down large core tasks into smaller ones.
• Dedicate time to planning business tasks that you haven’t planned yet within your schedules.
• Ensure gaps between meetings as much as possible. Don’t schedule meetings back to back if you have the option.
• Utilize the content management system or CMS integration to track content operations along with appointments and schedules.
• Take help from AI to plan the calendar and prepare for meetings.
• Audit past calendars and reflect on the issues and mistakes you might have made previously during calendar management.

Final Words

Calendar management is a skill that portrays the professional image of a virtual assistant. The more you work and improve this skill, the more you expand your caliber as a virtual assistant. It’s a work-and-learn process. But, proper research can speed it up to a significant level rather than just depending on experience.

Well, as you’re here, reading this article till the end, you’re already a step ahead.

So, just keep up the spirit!