Managing Diaries / Calendars for 2 Bossies

[kathczm]

Hello there

I am a newbie with a question which I hope you can help me with.

I am currently a team pa but will be moving on to a position as PA for 2 partners for a different firm in about 4 weeks time.

Whilst I am familiar with providing normal admin support, email support, project support, managing events, managing travel and screening calls, I haven't had all that much exposure to managing diaries as my current bossies mainly like to manage their own.

My new job will involve extensive diary management. I am sure  that I will be able to take on this new task successfully, but was wondering whether you have any tips for scheduling, rescheduling meetings, liaising with bossie if when things change etc. Or any other info you can provide on this subject? I will be using Outlook.

I look forward to your responses!

Cheers
Kath

[itsme_calista]

Congratulations on the new job

Diary management has to be my most hated task.  My boss likes to add things etc to his own and often doesn't tell me he's added things and expect me to pick up and reports etc.  I often don't because he doesn't include enough info ... i.e. there will be an all day appt just with the title London Visit!   argh!

Outlook has the facilility to display two calenders side by side which I find really useful and I've developed the habit of printing off a paper copy on a Friday so I can check for amendments that boss may have made over the weekend.

I use my calender for reminders for reports for relevant meetings, booking buffets, refreshments etc. as I rarely have any appointments for myself, and 9/10 they link to bossies diary.

I rarely add anything to his diary without running it past him, and he rarely cancels or rearranges appointments with external people, our internal contacts all accept that diaries need to change so reorganising isn't usually a problem.  Another PA in my office sits down with her boss every Fri afternoon or Monday morning to got through his paper diary and pull out anything that needs adding or changing.

Best thing to do is ask how they want to operate.  They may have their own ideas and if they have had PAs previously may already have some good techniques in place.

Good luck

Callie

[laurafmcdermott]

I currently manage three calendars, plus three conference room calendars, and have the ability to view five other calendars in Outlook.  You can view them all at once, it does get messy but at times is required to schedule an appointment for all!

Some recommendations:  find out from the folks you are managing how much control you will have.  I have complete control to add, change, delete as I see fit, which makes it easier, but if you have someone who needs to OK everything before it goes into the calendar you may want a daily or weekly calendar meeting to get everything straight.

Also, will they be using a handheld computer at all (Blackberry?).  My reports do and it helps tremendously, they have their calendar and all updates right in their hands if they are not in the office.

I have also found it helpful, since many of our appointments are off-site, to include travel times in with the appointments on the calendar.  So if a meeting is 9-10 am, but the office is 20 minutes from ours, I will book out the time from 8:40 to 10:20.  This helps keep them from being late and I know that even though a meeting is scheduled to end at 10, they won't be back for a bit.

Hope this is somewhat helpful!  Please post any specific questions.  Best of luck, I love Outlook and find it to be very useful, hope you do too!

[movinonup]

When arranging meetings for your direct reports, you may first need to check to see if a teleconference and/or web conference will be needed.  If so, arrange for those first, and add the info to the meeting you're setting up.  This happens so often for my managers, and they forget to ask me for the additional conference info ahead of time, so we're constantly updating meetings, rather than including it all at the start.

Another tip...when you schedule a meeting, you need to check to be sure invitees are free to attend.  Ask the chair which invitees MUST be there, and use that as a litmus test for the time and date.  

Advise the chairs of responses received later on, as well--so they'll have a list of participants to check off as they arrive.


Movinonup

[kathczm]

Thanks so much for your help! It is much appreciated!!

It makes me feel a lot better that it will be expected that I need to learn their ways of doing things and will need to learn how they like me to organise their days (eg. asking heaps of questions!) I was thinking that there is only one correct "way" of scheduling diaries and the fact that this is not the case is great news to me!!

Many thanks again for relieving me of my angst! If anyone has any other responses they would like to add I would love to hear them!!

Cheers
Kath