Zoom meeting invites are exploding

Every Zoom invite has a different meeting ID and password. In the before days, (you know, those days before Covid-19,) Zoom invites were mainly used for international webinars and meetings. I rarely received more than two invites per month as a writer.

Then came COVID-19.

Now everyone is sending Zoom invites

Now I get Zoom invites from my writing group, each writing association for classes, each writing conference I used to attend, from my daughters, from my friends, even from my church group. I can’t count the number of free writing webinars invites I get to up sell me on thousand-dollar opportunities to learn to make six figures on my novels. And the number is escalating every day.

The amount of time I spend just doing my “Read, Delete or Save” list is taking precious minutes  away from running my writing business, but that isn’t the biggest challenge we face as writing entrepreneurs. Keeping track of all those separate Meeting IDs and passwords is becoming our biggest challenge.

Now in addition to the Zoom invites, I am getting emails from friends, family, other writers asking me if I have the Zoom invite for meetings that I’m attending. It seems few people are able to track their invite information!

How to always find your Zoom invites

Here is a simple way to find your Zoom Meeting invite ID and password or the URL to click to attend your next meeting:

1. When you get a Zoom, invite schedule your event in your calendar program with the usual time and day information.
2. If your calendar allows you to include notes, then copy and paste the entire Zoom invite and paste into the event information. (If your calendar program doesn’t allow you to include notes, my suggestion is find one that does have this feature. You are going to need it until our Zoom days end. For the Mac I recommend Fantastical. Outlook allows you to drag and drop your Zoom invite email into Outlook to create an event. Your invite login info will be in your calendar and easy to find. If you don’t have or don’t like Outlook, you can find more Windows calendar programs on this page: https://alternativeto.net/software/fantastical/?platform=windows

With your event info in your calendar you will never have to email the meeting organizer again asking them to please send you the Zoom invite details.

Tips for those of you who send out Zoom invites:

I am the Chair of a Committee with an average attendance of 40 members each month, sometimes more. I learned the following tips the hard way after my first Zoom invite email:

1. Also send out a Zoom reminder email the morning of the event (if it is a morning event, send the reminder out the night before.) Include the Zoom invite. Few people seem to save it.
2. Copy the Zoom invite about an hour before the meeting, so when you get the emails from all the writers who can’t find their Zoom invite instructions, you can just paste and send the info to them.
3. Consider including the information above describing how to use the calendar to store their invite information where they can easily find it.
4. Using the same Meeting ID and password for every meeting doesn’t seem to cut down on the number of people who email you asking for the information a half hour before or into the meeting. Writers are getting so many emails these days they just lose the emails.

How to keep your emails manageable is a topic for a different blog post!