Thanks to Assistant.io for sponsoring BrettTerpstra.com this week. I’ve fallen in love with this service for scheduling any kind of meeting (or my podcast) and encourage anyone who schedules anything with other people to check it out!

Chances are, you probably have a Google account. Whether at work or at home, there are over 500 million Gmail users, and many of them use (and depend on) Google calendar. GCalendar works well on its own for many things, but it doesn’t make scheduling group meetings any easier–enter Assistant.io.

Remember that time when you tried to schedule lunch with a few friends, but it STILL hasn’t happened because no one could agree on a time and date? Or, that time (you know, like every week) that you had to schedule a meeting with a few co-workers and a potential client, and it took a ridiculous total of, like, 15 emails just to decide when to hold the meeting? How about that time that you proposed a meeting to a few different people and, forgetting what times you sent to who, you accidentally double-booked yourself?

We’ve run into all of the above situations and then some. That’s why we created Assistant.io: to save ourselves (and now you) from the embarrassment of double-booking, the painful overflow of emails caused by choosing a meeting time, and the inconvenience of sharing your calendar with everyone that you’ve ever had to meet with.

Assistant works like this:

  1. Log in with your Google account (takes seconds)
  2. Create a meeting with Assistant, propose a few times that work for you, and send it out to the people you want to attend.
  3. Sit back and wait for everyone to accept the times that work for them (or let them propose new times). All the while, the proposed times are blocked off on your calendar so you don’t get double booked.
  4. Once everyone has responded, Assistant picks the time that worked, sends out an email, and automatically sends a calendar invite (on your behalf) to everyone!

The people you invite won’t even have to create an account (they can respond right from their email OR by clicking through and selecting what works for them).

We dare you to try it out right now (it’s free!), and tell us that it didn’t make meetings just a little less painful (sorry, we can’t actually make meetings fun!).