Dollars & Sense

A Date With Calendars 📆

One of the main problems that businesses have is efficient use of time. A retailer (or brand or sales rep) seeks on a daily basis to manage their time and optimize results. (I was reminded of this while reading a The Wall St. Journal article about time management for the family.) Businesses use a variety of tools to manage and save time, including email, texting, and Zoom. 

Shop Local helps businesses in their quest to save time. We offer businesses a variety of services to help members save time, including the Brand Syncing service, which allows a retailer can fill their online store in minutes with up to 70,000 products. They save months of labor. Our clients save so much time that I've even compared the service to a time machine.  (Our service reminds me of the fortune-telling machine in the movie Big. Check out my post here comparing the movie Big and our service.) 

An important part of managing and optimizing time is the age-old calendar. Calendars date back 42,000 years. (An early "calendar" was made 42,000 years ago in a South African cave from a baboon fibula and is known as the Lebombo Bone. I wrote about that bone and its inspiration in a post here.) We use an online calendar made by Backpack (37 Signals) to manage a variety of needs for our company, including clients calls, appointments, trade show dates, team vacation days, and more.

Many of our clients have similar needs and likely use a calendar. A client may use Google Calendar, Apple's iCal, or some other software. The existing calendar choices are not connected to the business's website and likely do not contain content tailored to the business's needs. This leads me to ask: What if we could place a calendar feature inside our client’s Online Store? I think we can and should. In fact, we’ve started on this project and hope to have it launched this year. A client using our Online Store will be able to use this calendar to do many things. There will be two primary modes: a private, internal calendar that is visible to staff, and a public calendar visible on the retailer's public Store.

For example, a retailer will be able to view internally:

• Appointments with customers and gift registrants.
• Employees' work schedules.
• To-do items for employees. 
• Internal store events, such as a plumber or electrician coming.
• Industry show dates, such as the trade shows in Atlanta and Dallas.
• News from brands, such as product launches, product signings, and trunk shows. (Businesses will be able to share events on each other's calendars.)

The retailer's public calendar may display: 

• Store events.
• Store hours or closings that are not part of the usual schedule.

Homework: 
Imagine you are creating a calendar for your organization. Consider things that your group can share privately and publicly on its calendar.

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Check out The Wall St. Journal article that inspired this post:
 https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/your-schedules-just-got-crazy-again-try-these-tech-tools-6153a3f?st=0nzdaqlvue2x9et&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
 

Tags:
calendar time management

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