Refining your calendar data

The Inspirometer add-in for Outlook gathers data directly from your calendar within minutes of being installed in Outlook, according to our data privacy policy.

However, it has limitations, and it has to interpret what it cannot know from those things that it can. In this regard, it is forced to make a number of assumptions:

It assumes that any event in your calendar to which you have been invited, or to which you invited people, is a meeting (Outlook also defines such events as meetings).
It assumes that you only attended those meetings which you organised and accepted, and not those that you declined or cancelled.
It assumes that any event to which there are no invitations is not a meeting, and ignores all such ‘appointments’ with the exception of those that have a subject beginning with the word travel.

However, since your calendar has not been used in this way previously, it may be that you have adopted certain practices or conveniences which mean that your data does not always reflect the conventions defined above. In this case, your meeting stats are likely to be in error, and your calendar will need to be adjusted to enable your add-in to collect the right data.

If your data appears inaccurate, read the questions below to see which correspond to your situation, and then follow the steps to resolve this issue.

Q1: Does your meeting data appear to include holiday requests, and other ‘appointments’?

There is a practice, commonly adopted, of communicating holiday requests by placing them in your calendar, and then ‘inviting’ your boss and/or HR to the event in order that they are aware you are on vacation. This practice sometimes extends to other events such as symposia etc.
The fact that there are invitations in the event, and that Outlook deems it as a meeting (as you will be able to see in the heading if you open it up) causes the add-in to treat it as a meeting. In this way, a vacation of two weeks has a massive and inaccurate effect on the estimated time spent in meetings.The practice however is convenient, and fairly widespread, and there would be resistance to changing it. Fortunately there is a way round the problem. By either:

Changing the subject to precede it by the word Holiday:
Categorising it as Holiday

The add-in will ignore such events and exclude their data from the analysis.

If you have such data in your own calendar, please go back over the last year, and change the subject of such events, or re-categorise them accordingly. Then click the Inspirometer ‘Refresh Meeting Stats’ button at the top of your Outlook window.

To keep your data accurate, please follow the practice of always preceding the subject with the word Holiday: This will ensure that the event is ignored in both your calendar, and also the calendar of whomever you invite to this event.

Finally, if you set up your holiday as a meeting, the add-in will add meetings@inspirometer.com to the attendee list automatically, but you can delete it in the same way as you would remove other attendees added in error (unless of course, you actually wish to enable feedback on your week in Marbella).

Q2: Are some meetings missing from your data because they are saved as appointments?

Not every organisation or individual is good at sending out meeting invites from their calendar. Accordingly, you may have put placeholders in your calendar to remind you of your attendance at such events, but because they lack invitations, both Outlook and Inspirometer assume that they are appointments – you will be able to see this when you open them up (circled red in the picture on the right).

To ensure that these register in your data, we recommend that you prefix the subject with the text Meeting: (circled green in the picture on the right). This will enable you to identify them easily in your calendar, and it will enable Inspirometer to pick them up and add them directly to your meeting stats.

An alternative solution is to edit the event to invite attendees to it, and then simply invite yourself. This will ensure the meeting is included in your data.

If you believe that your stats are missing some important data for this reason, please work back through your calendar, and adjust them in either of the ways described above. Then click the Inspirometer ‘Refresh Meeting Stats’ button at the top of your Outlook window to update your data with these changes.

Q3: Are meetings missing from your stats because they have not been accepted, and vice versa?

Sometimes people have conflicts in their calendar. Clearly, since we cannot be in two places at once, such conflicts could reflect a duplication in the data.

It is therefore vitally important that the only meetings in your calendar that are accepted are the meetings you actually attended. All other meetings should be deleted (or at least declined).

Equally, it is important that you actively accept (even retrospectively) any meetings you actually did attend that are currently marked as tentative or ‘not yet accepted’. The image on the right shows a meeting which has not yet been accepted, but accepting it is as easy as selecting it and clicking the green ‘accept’ tick on the toolbar.

If you believe that your stats may be in error for this reason, please work back through your calendar, and accept or delete the relevant events until it reflects an accurate depiction of your time and attendance. Then click the Inspirometer ‘Refresh Meeting Stats’ button at the top of your Outlook window to update your data with these changes.

Q4: Is the add-in able to recognise and collect travel time associated with your meetings?

Sometimes the biggest impact of a meeting on your calendar is the time it takes to get to it. Typically, when people have an off-site meeting, they put a place-holder (appointment) in their calendar to allow them time to travel to and from the meeting without it being taken up with other meetings. Inspirometer has the ability to capture this time and reflect it in your stats, but in order to do this it needs to be able to identify it as different from the rest of your appointments.

This is easily achieved in one (or both) of two ways.

Either ensure that the subject field for the appointment begins with the text Travel:
Or categorise the appointment as travel

Please take the time to work through your calendar, looking for meetings which required travel, and making sure that they have appropriately timed travel appointments associated with them (even if they occur outside normal work hours). Ensure each of these items has a subject which begins with the text Travel: Then click the Inspirometer ‘Refresh Meeting Stats’ button at the top of your Outlook window to update your data with these changes.

Q5: Is it clear which of your meetings are physical meetings and which are virtual (web-based) or phone?

There is a popular opinion that physical meetings are more expensive and that virtual meetings are less effective. This may or may not be true for your own situation. Inspirometer can help you to identify your own balance between physical and virtual meetings, and to help assess the relative effectiveness of each.

To identify virtual meetings, please ensure that the medium being used is reflected in the location. Usually your web-meeting software will automatically populate the location field with words such as: Skype, Live meeting, Circuit, etc. Inspirometer looks for these words in the location field and assumes that they are virtual meetings (Please note, if you are using a web-based meeting tool which it is not identifying, please let us know). It also looks for the word phone, since this also is a virtual meeting.

Please check your virtual meetings to ensure that they reflect these words in ‘location’ and adjust any that do not – these are most likely to be phone calls. Then click the Inspirometer ‘Refresh Meeting Stats’ button at the top of your Outlook window to update your data with these changes.

We recognise that some people include a virtual option by default in their physical meetings, to accommodate people who cannot make it at the last minute. If this is the case we would recommend that you scrub out the virtual meeting software reference (circled in green) – which was automatically inserted when (in this case) Skype options were added to the meeting (circled in red) – and replace it with the physical location.

Q6: Do you need to capture asynchronous meeting time in your stats?

One of the key advances in collaboration technology over recent years is the enablement of asynchronous meetings. These are conducted via web-based software such as forums and social networks (examples of which are Yammer and Slack – shown on the right) and they enable information to be transmitted and discussions to develop over time. For certain types of collaboration, they are extremely efficient, since we can read faster than we can listen, and we can dip in and out as is most convenient in our diary.

Up until now, most businesses would view this activity as ad-hoc – something that people do when they can find time for it. But they are far more important than that, and as we become more aware of our efficiency in synchronous (together at the same time) meetings, we will discover that there is benefit in stripping out some of the meeting activity to this type of mechanism. As this happens, meeting effectiveness will become more dependent on what people do to prepare within these asynchronous devices, and people will need to take more responsibility for scheduling time for this in their calendars.

By prefacing the subject of these asynchronous activities with the text Forum: Inspirometer can capture this meeting time also, and track the extent to which meetings migrate through the various mechanisms as those mechanisms become more effective and efficient for us.

Q7: Are your Inspirometer settings configured to allocate events correctly?

In the preceding sections we have assumed that your Inspirometer settings are set to the default values which were in place when you first installed the Inspirometer add-in: ‘Travel:’ identifies an appointment which reflects travel time; ‘Meeting:’ identifies an appointment for a meeting which does not have a meeting invite.

The Inspirometer settings in your Outlook add-in provides a way of recognising certain key terms in the subject field of an Outlook calendar item. In most cases, the default terms will have been set by your administrator, but you can alter these by means of a dialogue box which can be enabled from within your Outlook settings (see the diagram on the right).

To access these settings (in Outlook 2010 or later, and providing you have the Inspirometer Outlook add-in installed and active) click on the File menu item(1), then the Inspirometer item (2), then edit the various identifier fields to reflect your own use of language (3), and save your settings (4). In outlook 2007, Inspirometer settings has its own menu item at the top.

Vacation identifiers are used to mark holiday that might otherwise be included in your meeting stats. Privacy identifiers indicate personal or private events that you wish to exclude from your data. Travel identifiers allow you to capture travel time to meetings by setting up travel ‘Appointments’ e.g. ‘Travel: to Wembley for HC meeting’.

Other meeting identifiers enable you to capture appointments that represent real meetings. Asynchronous meeting identifiers enable you to capture time spent in forums and network sites. All of the foregoing are picked up as terms in the subject field of the calendar item. If a partial string in the subject field matches one of the strings in these boxes, the item is handled accordingly (please note, the strings are not case sensitive – Travel: in the identifiers will also pick up travel: and TRAVEL:).

Virtual meeting identifiers work the same way, but they are looked for in the location field – a field that tends to be automatically populated by virtual meeting software.

You are welcome to change these identifiers to terms which have more meaning for you, but please ensure that all the terms you use in your calendar, and the terms you use in the identifier settings are consistent, or vital pieces of data will go missing. If you do change the identifiers, please be careful to make these terms broad enough that they pick up all the items they are intended to (separate different or alternative terms by commas), but not so broad that they pick up things they are not – for example: ‘Meeting to discuss vacation policy’. The inclusion of a colon as a suffix may help in this regard by differentiating words intended as labels from the same words in general use.