Why "What Time Works for You?" Is a Terrible Way to Schedule Meetings

It is one of the most common lines in professional email: "What time works for you?" It feels considerate and flexible. In practice, it is one of the slowest ways to get a meeting on the calendar.

Rather than settling the question, that single sentence usually launches a long chain of replies as everyone tries to converge on a time that works for the whole group.

The endless email loop

A "quick" scheduling exchange tends to unfold in slow motion. One person offers a couple of loose windows, the other counters with a specific hour, that hour turns out to be taken, a new option gets floated, and someone promises to double-check their calendar and get back to you.

What began as a simple ask becomes a stack of messages, calendar glances, and small corrections. Repeat that a dozen times a week and coordinating meetings quietly eats a real slice of your day.

The problem with open-ended scheduling

Open-ended questions create a few hidden costs:

• They push the work onto the other person. Now they have to open their calendar, scan availability, and propose options for you.
• They invite vague answers like "sometime next week," "afternoons are usually good," or "pretty flexible" — none of which are an actual time, so more follow-up is required.
• They do not scale. Every extra participant adds another calendar and another set of preferences to reconcile.

When scheduling turns into negotiation

Add a few people and scheduling stops being a question and starts becoming a negotiation. One person has an early standup, another has a school pickup, and someone is three time zones away. Without a shared view of everyone's availability, the thread can easily outlast the meeting it is trying to book.

A better approach: suggest specific times

A faster habit is to propose a short list of concrete options up front — for example, "Would Tuesday at 2pm, Wednesday at 11am, or Thursday at 9:30am work?" Offering real slots dramatically cuts the number of emails it takes to land on a time.

Even so, someone still has to check the calendars, send the options, and chase the replies. The coordination work does not disappear — it just moves.

Let an assistant handle the coordination

This is where a scheduling assistant earns its keep. Instead of people manually trading times, an assistant like OpenAssistant can review availability across participants, suggest options that work for everyone, and handle the responses right inside the email thread. Once a time is confirmed, it sends the invite. The conversation stays focused on the meeting itself, not the logistics of booking it.

Making scheduling less frustrating

Scheduling will probably never be the highlight of anyone's workday. But taking the back-and-forth negotiation out of it makes the whole process smoother. Instead of asking "What time works for you?" and bracing for a long thread, more teams are letting an assistant coordinate availability and finalize the details automatically. It is a small change that gives back a surprising amount of time.