Add the chosen date to your calendar

An availability poll ends on a quiet anticlimax. The table says Saturday 15 November, nobody objects, and then nothing happens: the date lives in a browser tab, on a link most participants will not open a second time.

Two weeks later someone asks whether it was the 15th or the 22nd. The answer is in the poll, which is exactly the problem. A results table records a decision; it does not come back and remind you of it. A calendar is the only place that pushes a date at you on the morning it matters.

So the last step of group scheduling is not picking the date. It is getting the date out of the table and into calendars, and that is a single click on the results page: Add to your calendar, on the row that won.

It matters more here than elsewhere, because Pollendar has no closing date, no automatic reminder and no notification that a decision was reached. Nothing expires and nothing nudges anybody. The export is what replaces all three.

Not every row. The button sits on the rows the table points at: the green one, where every single voter said yes, and the amber one behind it. Rows are ranked by the most yeses, then by the fewest nos, so a date missing one “maybe” comes ahead of a date missing one “no”. A date nobody said yes to never carries the button at all.

The restriction is deliberate. An export button on all fifteen rows of a poll is an invitation to book the date you personally preferred, which is how a group ends up with a confirmed Friday that three people cannot make. If you are unsure how the two highlights are decided, the rules for reading the table are worth two minutes before you export anything.

One edge case is worth knowing. When the colour would cover the whole table it is dropped, because a board highlighted end to end says nothing. But the rows that would have carried the button still carry it. And with a single voter nothing is highlighted at all, while a date that one person ticked can still be exported. The colour answers “where should I look”; the button answers “what could I book”, and those are not quite the same question.

The button opens a short menu with three entries. They produce the same event; what differs is where it lands.

If you only remember one of the three, remember the .ics file. It is the format every calendar application has agreed on for twenty years, and it is also the one you can forward: attach it to a message and the people who receive it add the event themselves, whatever they use. The other two simply skip the download and the import, which is worth something when the whole group already lives in the same place.

• The poll’s title becomes the event title. If your poll is called “Poll 3”, rename it before you export, or rename the event after: it is the line everybody will see in their own calendar for the next month.
• The chosen day, taken from the row you clicked. A “Date” poll gives a day; a “Time slot” poll gives the exact hours that were voted on; a “Period” poll gives the several consecutive days.
• Your time zone, already applied. Pollendar shows every date and hour converted to the zone you read in: your browser’s by default, or another one you picked in the settings menu, displayed next to the table. The export carries that zone with it, so the event is correct for whoever opens it and nobody does the arithmetic.

That last point is the quiet benefit of exporting rather than retyping. A date copied by hand into an invitation is a date somebody will convert wrongly; an event that carries its own time zone cannot be read an hour early in Lisbon and an hour late in Berlin. The same reasoning governs the poll itself, which is the subject of scheduling a meeting across time zones and worth a read when your group is spread over three countries.

There are two honest ways to finish, and the choice was partly made when you created the poll.

If you ticked “Ask participants for their email to add them to your calendar event”, the exported event can invite the people who said yes. They receive the invitation from your calendar, the date lands in theirs, and you can see who accepted in the place you already look. It is the shortest path from a results table to a room full of people.

That option has a cost, though, and it is paid by the participants: answering now means giving a name and an email instead of just a name. For a board or a team, nobody minds. For a dinner with eleven friends, an address is one more reason to close the tab. With the option off, a first name is enough, and the poll stays something you can answer in ten seconds.

Without emails, you announce the date yourself: one message with the day, the hour and the place, and the poll link underneath. Everyone who voted sees the same button on the same highlighted row, so each of them exports the event into their own calendar, in their own format. It is one extra click for them and no addresses handed over, which for a private gathering is often the better trade.

1. 1

   Choose the row, not the colour

   Green if there is a green row. Amber when nobody reached unanimity. In that case, look at who is missing before you book, because the table is telling you the best option is not a perfect one.

2. 2

   Export it once

   iCalendar if you are unsure or want something to forward, Google Calendar or Outlook Web if that is where your week already lives. Check the title while the event is still open.

3. 3

   Invite or announce

   Invite the yeses from the calendar event if you collected emails. Otherwise send one message with the date, the time and the place, and leave the poll link in it.

4. 4

   Then consider the poll finished

   Leave the link up for latecomers: there is nothing to close, and a late vote changes nothing now. The date exists in a calendar, which is the only place it needed to be.

A poll is not an invitation. Until somebody creates the event, a settled date is just a coloured row that five people have already stopped thinking about. The click that fixes it takes two seconds, and it is the one step people skip.