Editor’s Note: Today’s guest author Aaron Diek figured out a hack to turn his Google Apps Calendar into a appointment scheduler. Pretty awesome.
This article explains how to use Google Apps Calendar to avoid the problem of having to go back and forth to schedule a meeting. Nothing’s worse than offering a meeting time, not hearing back for a day or two or three, and then having the person accept it, only to realize you’ve booked someone else in the mean time.
My signature line looks like this:
This signature makes it easy for other Google users to schedule directly on my calendar. When they click schedule an appointment, they’re taken to my calendar with the list of possible appointments they can book.
Once it’s booked, an invite is sent to both of us. Let’s show you how it’s done:
Note: You must have GoogleApps for this to work; furthermore for people to schedule on your calendar, they’ll have to be using Google for scheduling as well.
Step 1: Create an appointment calendar.
You can’t create an appointment slot by clicking on the ‘Create’ button on the top-left-hand corner of the calendar.
Instead, you need to click onto a time slot on the calendar, and change the slot from an ‘Event’ to ‘Appointment Slot’. Type in a name for your appointment slot – something that will look good for every appointment slot, and then click ‘Edit details’.
Now you want to make sure this appointment will recur at regular intervals on your calendar, so on the Edit Details page you will want to make the event repeat itself.
Select the days that you want it to appear on your calendar every week, and the number of weeks you want it to recur for. The default will be that it never ends. Save the repetition rules, fill out the rest of the Appointment Slot with generic information that will apply to all of your appointments:
Then make sure you save your event, and you’re done with that recurring appointment slot.
I recommend that you make a number of recurring meetings throughout the day and stagger them across the week, so, say, Monday, Wednesday and Friday you have appointments at 9am, 10:30am, 1pm and 4pm, whereas on Tuesday and Thursday you have time at 11am, 12:30pm, and 2pm. It helps to make your calendar look like you’re not just wide open…Here’s what my calendar looks like:
Step 2: Get the Link to your Calendar
To get the link to your Appointment Calendar, click on one of the slots you’ve created and select ‘Edit Details’. On the details page you will see an unwieldy URL that Google assigns to your calendar. Copy that.
Step 3: Insert the Link into your Email Signature
Now that you’ve got this, you can go into your mail settings and edit your signature link to include a link to your calendar. 
Step 4: Your Appointment times are available to all
Whenever you send an email out to clients and prospects, it will be included, making both of your lives easier because they can go ahead and sign up for a time that is mutually convenient.
Good luck!
Today’s Author: Aaron Diek, Senior Account Executive at Radius – I am fascinated by sales and go-to-market strategies, and get my kicks figuring out the best way to get something done. Based in Berkeley, CA, I’ve trained sales teams from California to Croatia, selling everything from cups and furniture to online marketing and SaaS products.