Oftentimes, these actions come after someone, or some group, does a calendar audit and discovers the sheer volume of meetings eating up someone’s time. What is a Calendar Audit? A calendar audit is a quantitative analysis of the meetings you’re in every day and gives you a macro-perspective of how you spend your time.

Although it may be a relatively new concept for most people, calendar auditing is a process that has been around for decades. Most Executive Assistants are familiar with them. When an EA performs an audit, it gives their executives insights into how they spend their time, ultimately helping them to identify weaknesses and create more time in their schedule.

Sounds great in theory, right? The problem is that this process is incredibly cumbersome. 

Traditionally, the calendar audit process starts when you export the calendar data from your executive’s calendar - Outlook or Google - to a CSV file. This in and of itself can be tricky, depending on which calendar platform your team uses. 

Next, it requires cleaning up the data and categorizing it. Was this meeting a 1x1? What was the topic of this call? 

Further, the cleaned and categorized data must be put into a format that executives can quickly digest: charts. Sometimes this is straightforward, but most often, it takes additional time to manipulate the data so that it is compatible with a chart format.

Lastly, you must make time to review these insights with your exec and come up with a strategy for eliminating unnecessary meetings and prioritizing meetings, people, or free time (think time) in the future.

Due to the cumbersome nature of this process, Cabinet’s customers requested an automated solution. We’re happy to announce that in February of 2023, Cabinet will roll out a Calendar Reports feature that will streamline 90% of the process. It’s safe to say, we’ve never been more excited about a new feature. The time it saves EAs running audits and the strategic value it adds in their life will be the true measures of success.