To make scheduling your zoom conversation with friends as easy as possible, we recommend using doodle. Most folks have used it, but for those who haven’t, we wanted to make it effortless. It is actually very intuitive and easy, but there are a few tips to offer. First go to this link: Doodle. You will land on their home page with this banner. Most prominently, they will ask you to sign up for a free account, but you can skip that and just click on the red button at right “+Create a Doodle.”

Now you just enter a title for the meeting: “Talk with family” or something descriptive. You don’t need to add location or anything else.

Click continue and you land on a calendar. You simply use your cursor by placing it at a start time and then dragging down to the end time. Keep in mind that with a free zoom account, you can only hold 40 minute meetings so just schedule for 45 minutes or an hour. To schedule a second option, repeat the first step, but when you place the cursor on a start time, Doodle will automatically remember your last time and create another to match it, i.e. if you create a 45 minute first meeting, then it will create 45 minute meetings thereafter (although you can change that by just dragging the cursor for a longer or shorter time period. It is a good idea to offer a range of options. If you need to offer times in the next week, you click on the blue > at the top left of the page. When done, click “Continue.”

You will land on step 3 which is for “poll settings” which you can ignore and just hit continue. When you will land on Step 4 where you enter your name and email address. You will receive notifications when your friends have completed the poll at this email address.

Last step. Just click the blue “copy” button. Now go to your email program, enter the email addresses of those you are inviting and then write a note to them and paste in the link by hitting “CTRL-V.” The link will paste into your email. Just click send and you’ve off and running. Once you’ve sent the doodle, you just wait for responses and once you get a time that works for all or most, you move on to creating your Zoom meeting. Instructions for doing this are here.