Ask HN: Best tool to book "office hours"?

[angusdavis]

I believe in PG's post on maker's vs. manager's hours: http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

The use of office hours is a great solution.

I get INUNDATED with requests for meetings. If I said yes to all these coffee requests, I think I'd buy some Starbucks stock beforehand :-) Most of my requests are related to one of the major "themes" of my life/work -- generally they include: 1) helping other entrepreneurs/VCs/students or 2) my work on education reform. Today, I informally designate time a couple times a month on my calendar as office hours. I generally run an "ed reform" office hours block on my calendar once a month, and an "entrepreneurs" office hours block every 2 weeks.

It would be great if I could drive folks to a web-based tool (optimized for "makers" like us) to help schedule these requests, because I find just managing the flow itself is fairly taxing. The tool would let me pick the time range of hours, topic and duration of each meeting. It would also let me designate office hours as meetings or calls, and if meetings, designate a venue. It would have to somehow be respectful to the requester so I don't seem like an arrogant jerk for using a scheduling tool.

Further, I am willing to pay perhaps $12 per month or so for such a service. Maybe I am the only busy guy willing to do such a crazy thing. (Ok, Steve Blank fans...)

1) Does such a tool exist already? 2) If not, anyone want to build one?

[bahless]

Could you possibly use Google Calendar for this for now? You'd just have to set it up once with recurring weekly/daily events (like mornings for code) and set specific slots for office hours. People you invite can see which office hours slots you have open and type in their name

It's probably the fastest cheapest way

A vc also recently scheduled a meeting with me using: https://app.timebridge.com/login but not sure how useful it is

[nateaune]

Hey Angus - just saw you speak at the Startup Bootcamp yesterday. Great talk! http://startupbootcamp.mit.edu

For letting people schedule meeting with you, you might try Tungle.me. See my page here for an example: http://tungle.me/natea

[xg]

I've met with people that use an app called TimeDriver. It's alright, but maybe not ideal (I found the experience both useful and cold at the same time). Perhaps you could warm it up by having goofy confirmation messages. It goes for $30 / year for a subscription.

[ErrantX]

Interesting idea; I cant think off the top of my head of a service that does do this...

Might be willing to give it a shot - got any other ideas for what sort of thing you'd look for? (drop me am email if you like)

[angusdavis]

I haven't looked exhaustively, but there are solutions out there to book appointments with your doctor or dentist, and there must exist some solution to book an appt with your professor, but what's needed here is something simpler, i think. it would be interesting to see what others say.

See also http://officehours.firstround.com/ and I think Fred Wilson does office hours now too. I wonder what tool, if any, PG uses?

[ErrantX]

Yeh I get what you mean; something simple where you can say "I want a 4 hour block here - divided into 30 minute segments - so that people can type in their details and select a block and brief out what they want to discuss".

We had a similar system at uni for booking tutor time - but as you say it was overly complicated.

I'll have a mull over :D