My Calendar Invite Finally Tells Me Who I'm Talking To

By Junaid Ahmed

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Ten minutes before a recording, I open the calendar event.

It said this:

Podcast Interview for Hacks and Hobbies Guest: Eduardo Villavicencio Email: edvisionit@gmail.com

That's it. A name I half-remember and an email.

Meanwhile the guest had filled out a whole form. Where we met. What their episode should be called. Whether they'd done a podcast before. All of it sitting in PodGlue, one browser tab and about ninety seconds away.

Ninety seconds is nothing. Except it's ninety seconds while the guest is already in the waiting room, and you're the one who looks unprepared.

What it says now

The same event, today:

Podcast Interview for Hacks and Hobbies

Guest: Eduardo Villavicencio Email: edvisionit@gmail.com Phone: +1 301 974 4740

, Guest intake, Done a podcast before: yes Hobby / interest: Car mechanics Favorite movie or show: Life as Chuck Where we met: DCBX dancing Episode title: How to Ask Questions with Listening Habits in Mind

The phone number matters more than it looks. When someone doesn't show, the calendar event is what's already open on my screen.

The detail I'm oddly pleased about

If you've built your own booking form, your questions show up worded the way you wrote them.

That sounds obvious. It wasn't. Behind the scenes, a custom question gets flattened into a key and chopped at sixty characters, so "What is your favorite movie or tv show, if none how about a book?" becomes a mangled string that reads like a license plate. The email had already solved this. The calendar event now uses the same solution rather than a second copy of it that would eventually drift.

Blank answers just don't appear. A calendar description gets scanned in about four seconds, a wall of "Not provided" is worse than nothing.

And it can't break your booking. If the intake is missing or malformed, the event still gets created without it. Nothing about this is allowed to be the reason a booking fails.

One thing worth knowing

Your guest is on that invite, so they can read the description. I thought about that before shipping it.

They only ever see what they typed themselves. Nothing about them that they didn't write, and nothing about anyone else. That felt like the right line.

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Everything a guest tells you should end up where you'll actually be looking when you need it. Usually that's not the app, it's the calendar event that pops up ten minutes before.

PodGlue keeps what your guests tell you attached to the moment you need it.