What's an Activity Series?

Suppose you've got a new prospective client that you've just added to your contacts. You want to make an initial phone call to introduce yourself, follow up a few days later with a letter, and finally make another phone call in two weeks to see where things stand.

In past versions of Time & Chaos, you would need to create these one by one as three separate to do items, and you would have to do it by hand again for the next hot prospect, too.

Intellect lets you make a predefined list of to do items or appointments then save it as a series that you can reuse again and again for other contacts.

• different than repeating events where the same thing happens again and again
• create a template list of appointments or to do items that happen on your self-defined time frame (two days before, seven days later, two weeks later, etc.)
• add a complete series of appointments or to do items by right-clicking in appointment or to do list window

Step 1 of 3: Launch the Activity Series Editor

Under the Tools menu at the top of Intellect is the option to open the Activity Series Editor.

Step 2 of 3: Create a new Activity Series

• Choose an Activity Type: Appointment Series or Task Series
• Give your Activity Series a Name to save it as
• Add activities, specifying how many days after the series start each item should take place. In addition to providing Priority for Tasks and Start/End Times for Appointments, you can provide a description, a group, and basic notes.
• Even choose to have items show up on the next weekday, so items don't get scheduled for Saturday or Sunday.

Tip:  If you use this feature a great deal, you'll find that you end up with many items with the same description, even though they are linked to different contacts. If you add %LINKEDNAME% to your Description, it will get automatically replaced with your contact's name instead!

For example, this description in the Activity series editor:

Make initial phone call to %LINKEDNAME% to introduce our products

would become this on the task list when it was actually used:

Make initial phone call to Doe, John to introduce our products

Step 3 of 3: Add a series to your Appointment or To Do schedule

From the Appointment or Task windows on the main screen, or even the Linked Appointments or Linked To Dos from the Contact details screen, you can choose to create a New Series by right-clicking.

This screen will pop-up to let you choose which series you want to use and which client these items should be linked to.

You'll see that instead of days after series start, this screen shows you the actual dates that are about to be added to your schedule!

Don't forget that with each of these new items being linked back to the Contact, they are easy to find if you open the Contact details for this individual and go to Linked Appointments or Linked Tasks to review what you have planned for them.

This help article applies to Intellect 3