Google Calendar makes rescheduling meetings easier

Nobody really likes meetings — and the few people who do like them are the ones with whom you probably don’t want to have meetings. So when you’ve reached your fill and decide to reschedule some of those obligations, the usual process of trying to find a new meeting time begins. Thankfully, the Google Calendar team has heard your sighs of frustration and built a new tool that makes rescheduling meetings much easier.

Starting in two weeks, on August 13th, every guest will be able to propose a new meeting time and attach to that update a message to the organizer to explain themselves. The organizer can then review and accept or deny that new time slot. If the other guests have made their calendars public, the organizer can also see the other attendees’ availability in a new side-by-side view to find a new time.

What’s a bit odd here is that this is still mostly a manual feature. To find meeting slots to begin with, Google already employs some of its machine learning smarts to find the best times. This new feature doesn’t seem to employ the same algorithms to proposed dates and times for rescheduled meetings.

This new feature will work across G Suite domains and also with Microsoft Exchange. It’s worth noting, though, that this new option won’t be available for meetings with more than 200 attendees and all-day events.