I am a busy guy. Between work, sports, friends, and planning a wedding, I barely have enough time for myself. Don't get me wrong, I like doing all those things (well, some more than others), so I'm always trying to pencil things in or squeeze the most out of my days.

One thing I find that helps me personally is logging personal appointments and tasks into Maximizer. If you flag something as "personal appointment" when creating an appointment, it'll show up as "private appointment" if others are viewing your calendar. This helps me keep track of big things I have to do.

So the other day, a friend wanted to watch the second Transformers movie with him. It's out on the 24th. But I had a feeling that I might have something to do that day. So I go ahead and create an appointment in Maximizer.

When creating an appointment, rather than just typing a time into the Start time field, I click on the ellipes (...) and the "Find Free Time" dialog appears. So I scroll to the 24th to see if I can find 8 or 9 consecutive hours (because obviously we have to watch the first one again before we watch the second one). Turns out I'm busy that day, but the next day, I'm free.

So in summary, clicking on the ellipses when creating an appointment will bring up the "Find Free Time" dialog box. Any non-highlighted box means that that slot is free. Dragging your mouse over multiple consecutive fields will highlight them and clicking OK will book that time for your meeting or whatever you are planning to do.  There is a Find Time button on the Add Hotlist Task dialog too.  It works the same way.

This function is big for me because I do book everything in Maximizer. Obviously, if I didn't, then my entire calendar would appear to be free. So it's important for me to always keep things in my calendar, even though it is a bit of a pain sometimes.

It is too bad that we don't make a plug-in that will tap into your mind and figure out when you are free or not without entering it into Maximizer. That would be huge. Check Maximizer CRM version 60, tentatively due out in the year 2110.