We’ve all been using Zoom, Google Meet, and other electronic meeting apps for months now, and many of us have figured out a way to manage the links to all these meetings. However, there are still some of us who are still fumbling without a simple way to keep track of how to get to the meetings we’re interested in. If you’re a member of PMUG, as I assume you are, you may have three or four planned meetings every month to track—more if you belong to other organizations. So I thought I’d share the process I use and along the way introduce you to a small utility I’ve found extremely useful. I will assume, like me, you’re using Apple Mail and Calendar.

When a meeting announcement arrives, I select the contents of the message and use the date in the message to create a new calendar entry.

If that entry is like many I receive, the meeting URL is embedded somewhere within the meeting information. To make meetings easier to find, I’ve set up an email flag called Upcoming Zoom. Later, I can display just those messages with that flag in order to find the meeting information. However, if I have a lot of meetings, or if the meeting administrator sent meeting announcement out early, it still might be a search to find the right email.

Meeter to the Rescue

Meeter (https://trymeeter.com/) is a small productivity app featured on the website 9to5Mac, MacRumors, Macworld and others. It automatically pulls all my upcoming meetings into a single menu-bar icon where it sorts them by date with the next meeting at the top of the list.

From there I can merely click on the meeting and Meeter, recognizing the meeting platform, launches the appropriate meeting app. Boom, I’m in my meeting or I’m waiting for the meeting administrator to let me in. The software is pretty robust and allows you to change some of its behavior on the Preferences window.

Meeter works with Zoom, Webex, Teams, Facetime, GoToMeet, Hangouts, Chime BlueJeans, and Meet. You can adjust the preferences to show today’s meeting or 3, 7 or 10 days in the future. If you use multiple calendars to manage your work, you can tell Meeter which ones to pay attention to, and you can set up speed dial information for specific contacts.

It is currently free. (I’m using version 1.8.9.)

As you would expect of Mac software Meeter (https://trymeeter.com/) just seems to work without a lot of diddling around on my part. Check it out.

Mary Ann Clark