A client called me frustrated about her scheduling tool. She'd been using it for two years. It was glitchy, she said. It sometimes sent double notifications. It sometimes failed to block off her personal calendar during client appointments. She'd looked at switching to a competitor and asked me to help with the migration.

I asked if I could take a look at the current setup before we moved anything.

She sent me the access. It took about twenty minutes to understand what was happening.

What we found

She had two calendar connections. When she'd originally set up the tool, she'd connected her personal Google Calendar. When she moved to Google Workspace for the business a year later, she'd connected the business calendar. Nobody had disconnected the personal one.

The software was checking both calendars for conflicts. The personal calendar had a recurring event from 2022 — a standing call that had long since ended, but the calendar invite was still there, set to repeat weekly. It was blocking Tuesday afternoons indefinitely.

She also had buffer time set to fifteen minutes after appointments, but the setting had been applied on the old event type (the one from 2022) and not on the current ones. So new bookings had no buffer and were landing back-to-back with no gap.

The double notifications were coming from the same source: two calendar connections, both sending their own confirmation emails for the same event.

We disconnected the old calendar, deleted the ghost recurring event, updated the buffer settings, and confirmed the notification settings were set to send from one source only.

Total changes: eleven. Total time: forty minutes. Total cost: zero.

She did not need a new scheduling tool.

Why this kind of problem is so common

Software accumulates configuration the same way physical offices accumulate stuff. Every time a setting gets changed, every time a new feature gets enabled, every time someone sets something up and then leaves and nobody cleans up after them — layer by layer, the setup drifts from its original logic.

Nobody sits down to audit the settings. Nobody asks "is everything in here still accurate?" Because the tool is running, and running seems like it means it's working.

Until it doesn't, and the assumption is that the tool is broken.

What this means practically

Before switching any software you're unhappy with, spend thirty minutes asking whether the problem might be setup rather than software. Specifically:

Are there any connected accounts, integrations, or data sources that shouldn't be there anymore?

Are there any settings that were configured a long time ago that might not reflect how you actually work now?

Are there any recurring items — events, automations, scheduled reports — that were set up for something that no longer applies?

The answer, often enough, saves a migration.

This kind of review is part of how I approach the [full tech stack setup](/services/full-tech-stack) and the free audit. Half the time, the answer isn't "switch tools." It's "fix the setup." [Start with the audit.](/contact)