The plethora of communications channels – conference calls, e-mail, online chats — has made scheduling appoints easier than ever. Perhaps too easy, in fact. These days, we regularly overbook ourselves with back-to-back conference calls, face-to-face conversations, online chatter, e-mail, and more. Our thinking, of course, is as long as many of the meetings are online it should be a breeze to bounce from one to the other. But how many times has an overly ambitious schedule backfired on you?

Maybe you weren’t as prepared for a meeting as you should have been or a meeting didn’t correspond to your grand plan and took longer than expected, making you late to the rest of your meetings. It’s happened to us all. This schedule overload is compounded when teams are involved and multiple schedules are juggled. Not only do you have to coordinate with various schedules, but team members can unwittingly schedule an important meeting when another key team member has a conflict.

Of course, the Syncing.net team suggests simply downloading syncing software so that all team members have access to each other’s calendars – mitigating over scheduling. But in addition to this, there other things you can do:

- Leave 30 minutes between online/phone meetings. You may not think you have time for this, but it will be worth its weight in gold. This gives you a cushion between meetings or some prep time before the next one. If this absolutely isn’t possible, try to do all the prep before the string of meetings start. You should try to leave an hour between face-to-face meetings, unless they are all in the same location. Then apply the 30 minute rule.

- Have time carved out for meetings each day. Also for reoccurring meetings, try to schedule them at the same time each week/day. This makes it easier to manage your schedule and slot in the inevitable, unexpected surprise meeting.

- Choose one to three people to be “vitals” on the team. These are the people whose schedules matter most with regards to conflicts. If one (or all) of those in this category can’t make it, consider rescheduling. Otherwise, accept that not all meetings require all hands.