Some clubs use software to automatically schedule members for various meeting roles - speaking, running the timer, and so on - weeks or even months in advance. Maybe it’s because I’m in Redmond, a pretty high tech (read high geek) area that I see this.

You can probably cobble Microsoft Excel to generate a schedule for you, but there is dedicated software here that does this and has a lot more bells and whistles. Not that I’m encouraging anyone to use it!

Let’s kill auto-scheduling! It looks good on paper but having seen it in operation in multiple clubs, I don’t like it. Auto-scheduling doesn’t provide the vast time savings it’s supposed to, it establishes bad habits in members, it doesn’t give members the freedom to set their own pace of development, and it robs the VPE of a really great growth opportunity.

NOT A TIME SAVER AND ESTABLISHES BAD HABITS

• If a computer signs me up to be speak two weeks from now, I haven’t truly made a commitment. If I don’t feel much like speaking two days before the meeting, I won’t feel bad backing out. If on the other hand I raised my hand and said, “I’ll speak two weeks from now” then me backing out at the last minute is lame.

   

  I have some anecdotal evidence for this. My club does not auto-schedule and we have people miss obviously, but the rate isn’t too bad. In a club I I know that auto-schedules (and I’m on the email list for so I can spy), every week there’s a flurry of, “I can’t make it” mails.

   

  This gets people accustomed to backing out on Toastmaster assignments. Far better to have a nearly %100 rate of actually showing up when the schedule says you will.

   

• On a related note, I’ve seen cases where people show up for meetings not knowing they have roles. This is a disaster. It makes the poor person look bad and is a big demotivator and makes the Toastmaster’s life harder.

   

• The way to workaround the “I didn’t realize I was on the program…” is that you make people respond to the email confirming they will show up. But people invariably reply-all to these emails, which means more spam for everyone else. If I volunteer and say, “I’ll show up next Saturday and be timer” that’s all the confirmation that’s needed.

   

  The auto-scheduling club sometimes has +10 emails around scheduling a week. My club that does not has only 1-2.

   

TAKES FREEDOM AND INITIATIVE FROM MEMBERS

• Some speakers are hot-to-trot to speak more frequently because they have aggressive timelines for themselves. Others may be either missing meetings or too busy to do anything that requires preparation. It’s possible to manually tweak the auto-scheduling program to handle this, but it’s a huge amount of work. Far better to just let people fill out the agendas themselves.

   

• It’s critically important for new members to be signed up in jobs ASAP. I started as a timer, then grammarian, then did my ice breaker once in the weeks immediately after joining the club. I wanted to hit the ground running while I had a lot of excitement around TM. If I join a club where people are scheduled two months out in advance, I’m being told I have to wait around forever before I can really make my deep dive into the TM program. Just showing up and watching someone else’s speech and doing table topics if there’s time is not the same as knocking out my ice breaker.

   

• The new member should be speaking more in general and should be encouraged to do so even if they’re not wanting to take over the speaking world. There’s far more value in a new member going from their first speech to their second than there is in my going from my fortieth speech to my forty-first . I love to talk, but as an experienced TM I will only put myself on the program if there are openings because I want the new guy to have first dibs.

   

• A lot of people (myself included) hate the idea of anyone other than themselves dictating the pace they move through Toastmasters. It’s philosophical I know, but a lot of people feel very strongly about it.

   

TAKES A CHANCE FOR DEVELOPMENT AWAY FROM VPE

• The officer in charge of scheduling (Vice President of Education, aka VPE) is probably the most challenging in the club. Unless your club is bulging with active members, the challenge comes in begging and threatening people to do what you want them to do. I learned more in my first two months twisting arms as VPE than I did in any other two month period in Toastmasters.

   

  The VPE in the auto-scheduling club doesn’t get this. They punch buttons into a computer and end up working around the inherent flaws I’ve laid out above. In my no-auto schedule club, there was none of this for me. I knew I had to fill out the program without Mr. Computer and our membership was quite low at that point, so I learned about backing people into a corner and practically forcing a pen into their hands to make them do what I wanted.

   

• The main counter-argument I get here is, “Well John, there’s folks in our club who wouldn’t sign up otherwise.” Well - if someone does something because a computer tells them to do it, they should do it because a person tells them too, right? When I was VPE I made a list of veterans that never spoke and a few months into my term I arm-twisted them into speaking. This though is the type of thing the VPE should be tracking anyway.