Who can use this feature?
In the dynamic world of business, managing your schedule efficiently can be the key to maximizing productivity and ensuring you never miss an opportunity. ChiliCal’s Priority Scheduling feature is designed to streamline your day, allowing you to prioritize, deprioritize, and automatically adjust meetings based on your needs and preferences.
Let’s dive into how you can leverage this functionality to make the most out of your workday.
Table of Contents
Searching for Events
The first step we need to take to start configuring this feature is opening ChiliCal Scheduler and clicking the "Priority Scheduling" button on the Home Menu. You will notice that a new menu entitled "Flexible events" will open on the right-hand side.
After that, we can select the event we want by clicking on it. Depending on the event's settings, some options will be displayed.
Mark Individual Event
This one should be straightforward: click on the required event, which will be included in the Flexible Events menu. You can click on multiple events if you want to set the action to be taken in one shot. Clicking on a previously selected event will remove it from the Flexible Calendar menu.
If you want to act only on that specific event, you can ignore the other options displayed by ChiliCal and set the action for this specific event. Otherwise, the following sections might be helpful.
Your Recurring Events
If you have any recurring events (series), you will see them under the "Your recurring events" tab.
From there, you can decide what should be done to each event before saving the settings. Available actions will be explored further, and you can also decide not to do anything with them, which means they will not be part of your Priority Scheduling calendar.
A real use case example would be users who have a Lunch block daily at 1 PM, but they want to keep this Lunch block flexible to receive new meetings if any prospects select that same time for a meeting.
Going further, let's suppose that these users want to give this flexibility only for lunch blocks in specific weeks, but keep other ones as non-flexible, which should be possible too!
General Settings
Having blocks on your calendar to organize your daily routines better is pretty standard. Sometimes, finding all those blocks individually might be time-consuming for users who like to organize themselves this way. Considering this scenario, we gathered those events under the "General Settings" tab.
Normally, personal events only include the organizer/owner, so this would be an easier way to filter them and point out which ones should be flexible.
Available Actions
All actions mentioned in this section can be applied to individual or all events simultaneously. For example, you can set specific events to auto-reschedule, other ones to cancel, or set all of them to perform the same action.
We'll cover how to do it under each action-related section - remember to Save once you're done!
Remove from Flexible Priority
To remove all events from the Flexible Events menu, click the three dots in the upper right and select the "Remove all Group from Low Priority" option. If you have multiple series included, you must remove them one by one.
To remove individual events, click on them on the calendar view or click the three dots right next to the desired event and select the "Remove from Flexible Priority" option.
Keep both
This option is recommended if you would like to keep both events in your calendar at the same time. Note that if this is enabled, you may see two events at the same time in your calendar.
Remember that lunchtime-related example provided above? Let's say we would like to keep the Lunch block, even if a meeting comes up simultaneously: this would be the option to look for.
To apply this option to all events included in the Flexible Events menu, click the "Upon Booking" dropdown at the top, and then "Keep both"
If you would like to apply this to specific events, click the three dots right next to the desired event and then "Keep both"
Auto-Reschedule
Just so you know, this option is only available for meetings where you are the organizer/host. If you can't see this option, you likely selected a meeting with a different organizer/host.
If this option is selected, Chili Piper will reschedule the event to another slot within the user calendar that is available for the same event length, taking into account the user's working hours. We will reschedule for up to three weeks in the future.
To apply this option to all events included in the Flexible Events menu, click the "Upon Booking" dropdown at the top and then "Auto-Reschedule"
If you would like to apply this to specific events, click the three dots right next to the desired event and then "Auto-Reschedule"
Cancel
This would be the best choice to automatically cancel the event, which would be marked as flexible if another meeting comes in.
Suppose you have an internal block when finishing a task for my manager. However, if any meetings with prospects come in, they need to be prioritized, and you don't want to keep this internal block in your calendar: if you select this option in the Flexible Events menu, Chili Piper will remove the internal task block for you, and keep only the new meeting in your calendar.
With this, you don't need to go straight into your calendar instance and manually remove any blocks.
To apply this option to all events included in the Flexible Events menu, click the "Upon Booking" dropdown at the top and then "Cancel"
If you would like to apply this to specific events, click the three dots right next to the desired event and then "Cancel"