Schedule This

If ever there was going to be a doctor’s office that would remind you of your appointments, it should be a pediatrician’s (do you know how many ‘well child’ visits there are?!). Sure, thanks to Bill Gates, you can write the appointments in your Outlook calendar. But Bill forgot a few things: busy people multitasking between their work lives and their family lives, who are trying to get everything done in both of their worlds. (As a side note, does Bill have kids?) Anyway, having just scheduled an appointment with my son’s doctor in my work Outlook calendar for 9 a.m. this morning (it’s now after 3 p.m.), I come back to the same old thing and can’t stress the importance of it—reminders. If your business relies on people remembering appointments, even if they have all the bells and whistles on their computers to send them alerts—if you don’t remind them, good luck, they may end up marking down an appointment for that day instead of a week from that day. Yes, the technology is there, and yes, even before it was, secretaries called to remind you, but who can count on that? After all, I’m six hours late for an appointment.