It’s been over a year since COLI first posted about using scheduling tools to schedule appointments with students and colleagues. We continue to hear from colleagues who spend a lot of time emailing back and forth to find good meeting times with students and with each other. One of the tools we suggested is called 10to8. COLI has been using this tool for over a year now and we just wanted to revisit this topic and report on the goodness.
10to8 is a free appointment management software that have built in automatic text reminders. Though there is a premium version, the free version has been robust enough for all of our needs. It allows for up to 100 appointments a month. during the academic months, 25 appointments are booked with COLI staff on average. 10to8 provides us a personal ‘Web page’ that contains all of our options for meeting. We have even added this link to our email signature so we can reference it when replying to people who request a meeting. Each semester, we block off time on our Exchange calendar that people can book through 10to8. We have decided 1 hour time blocks fits our needs and offers enough turnover between meetings. Originally, we created appointments for different needs: WordPress, D2L, Qualtrics, etc. We found that most people were coming in with multiple requests and so we changed these options to simply ‘Meet with Leah’ or ‘Meet with Mark’. Individuals receive email and text (optional) meeting confirmations automatically. And we always get the option of approving an appointment. We now even use this feature with our own students. Students can easily book time with us for one-on-one or group meetings.
We strongly feel this tool has saved us loads of time in the past year. We used to spend a lot of time emailing and re-emailing times to people. In the past year, we have received no complaints about the tool. In fact, we have heard nothing but rave reviews about how easy it is to use and how people appreciate not having to wait for a reply. This tool have greatly helped us, and we know it can help you. If you or your office is interested in using it, sign up for a free account or book a consultation with us for a demo.