How to set-up and use the Team Meeting Optimizer

In Morgen Assist, the Team Meeting Optimizer helps optimize the scheduling of meetings across your team. Note that while in beta, Morgen Assist works with Google, Outlook, iCloud, and Fastmail Calendars (even if you use Morgen). More CalDAV integrations are coming soon.

The Team Meeting Optimizer is designed to help teams optimize their schedules in a way maximizes uninterrupted time for deep work. When you use the optimizer with your team, flexible events will be rescheduled in ways that minimize fragmentation of all invitees’ calendars.

How the Team Meeting Optimizer works

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Meetings, though necessary and important, are often flexible in terms of their exact timing. That’s why the optimizer will only reschedule those meetings that the meeting organizer identifies as flexible (#flex). Even then, #flex meetings will only be rescheduled if in doing so, there will be gains in focus time for the invitees.

The workflow runs daily at 6pm and optimizes flexible events in the current and following work week. (Current and next day events will not be rescheduled, ensuring everyone has adequate notice.)

You can also be confident that events will only be rescheduled during work hours, as set in your team preferences.

How to set up the Team Meeting Optimizer for your team

From the Workflow Gallery in Morgen Assist, click on +Create in the Focus Workflow.  

You will then name the workflow and choose whether to opt to make all one-time events flexible. (If you don’t select this, only those events with #flex in the event name or notes will be considered flexible.)

You can then invite your team members to join the workflow, who will receive an invite asking them to join the flow.

How to join your team workflow

If you received an email inviting you to join the Team Meeting Optimizer workflow, simple click Join next to the workflow in Your Workflow tab of Morgen Assist.

You will see who else from your team is also part of the workflow. Now that you’ve joined the team, your schedule will be considered when meetings are being rescheduled.

How to use the Team Meeting Optimizer

Once your team has joined, you can start adding #flex in the name or notes of events you create.  

At 6pm daily, the workflow will run, however, you can always manually trigger it anytime. To do so, from My Workflows, click the Run button corresponding with the Team Meeting Optimizer workflow. If any events are rescheduled, all attendees will be notified by email and the event will now appear at the new time in everyone’s calendars.

Tip: The impact of the workflow is entirely dependent on how many events are marked as #flex. This is a behaviour change that can take time to adopt. Checking in on the dashboard as a team weekly can be a helpful reminder.

How to see the impact

You can monitor and check on the impact of using the workflow in your team dashboard on the Morgen Assist homepage. There you will see how much uninterrupted time has been gained across your team, as well as for certain individuals.

How to test it

Once you’ve set up the workflow, you can easily test it to see that it is working as you expect.

To do so:

• ‍In your calendar, open a new event next week. This will be your test event. Tip: The event shouldn’t be back-to-back with any other event, and ideally be placed in the middle of large empty block of time. ‍
• Make it flexible. Include #flex in the event title or description. (ex. Code review #flex) ‍
• Save it. ‍
• Trigger the Optimizer. The Team Meeting Optimizer runs daily at 6pm, though you can manually trigger it any time. Return to My Workflows on Morgen Assist, and click the Run button for the Focus Optimizer. ‍
• Check your calendar. Head back over to your calendar. You will see that the #flex event has moved in a way that maximizes uninterrupted time.

You can also test it with your team

‍Once your team has joined the workflow, we recommend testing it as a group so everyone knows what to expect. Invite your team members to 2-3 #flex Test Events to see how the events are rescheduled to minimize fragmented time across everyone’s calendars. (We recommend creating more than one test event since the gains in uninterrupted focus time will vary from person-to-person, depending on schedules, constraints, and the number of invitees.)