Being self-employed forces one to be very resourceful, especially when you have to coordinate your schedule with a LOT of clients.  I just stumbled upon a FREE web application that is bound to save you and your clients a lot of time and frustration.  Tungle.me is not a calendar, but rather an enhancement to the calendar you already use.  If you are scheduling in any of these environments:  iCal, Entourage, Outlook, Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Xing, Ning, iPhone, then you are ready to use Tungle.me with minimal setup effort.

I happen to use Apple iCal, but in actuality Google Calendar is what powers my scheduling.  iCal just connects to Google through its "Accounts" feature, which can connect to any online calendar system that supports the CalDAV protocol.  The beauty of using Google Calendar is it can connect to so many different services, and it syncs flawlessly with my Blackberry over the T-Mobile's data network.  I don't have to wait until I get home to plug my USB cable in to get calendar updates.  I do a similar procedure for all of my contacts in Apple Address Book, as well. 

OK, getting back on topic, what Tungle does is fascilitate the coordination of meetings between two or more people.  You can establish the meeting, or any one else who has access to your Tungle.me link.  Ours is tungle.me/vostudiotech, go ahead and take a peek.  The user can propose multiple dates and times, invite multiple attendees, set the duration of the meeting, topic, and so on.  Then, Tungle sends an email to the list and invites the others to chime in with their prefered meeting time.  Once the time is settled, Tungle automatically places the meeting into the calendar that's synced to it, and notifies the attendees. 

When you setup Tungle, you establish what default openings you want to make available each day of the week.  If you place something in your Google Calendar, Tungle knows and makes that time unavailable for meeting.  Tungle makes it impossible to double-book anything, and eliminates what can seem like endless back-and-forth emails to lock down a schedule.  We're putting it to the test right now, and I can say that so far it has worked flawlessly!