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How to set your availability for meetings
How to set your availability for meetings

Customize your availability by setting your work hours, specifying availability for every event template, or by selecting Guarded Mode

Macrina Damian avatar
Written by Macrina Damian
Updated over a week ago

When using FreeBusy, you have full control over when you are available for meetings (depending on your subscription level).

I will show you how to compose your availability via FreeBusy in different scenarios.

You can customize your availability in 3 ways:

  • Update your work hours (your general availability)

  • Customize your availability for each event template (fine tune your general availability specified in your work hours)

  • Guarded Availability (by default you are marked as busy and you will have to create Free events in you calendar and manually specify the time-range when you want to be available for meetings)

1. Update your work hours

Default working hours in FreeBusy are from 8AM to 5PM, but you can set your own hours according to your own work hours. This will serve as guard rails for your availability and appointment will never be booked beyond these work hours.

FreeBusy allows you to express your bookable work hours in discontinues time ranges so you don't have to block your calendar for lunch time or any other times when you don't usually take meetings.

For example, my lunch time is 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM so I did not cover that time in my work hours. I simply stretched first time range from 8:00 AM to 11:30 AM and started a new time range from 12:30 AM. So on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday so my bookable work hours would be 8:00 AM - 11:30 AM and 12:30 PM - 6:00PM.
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You can add as many time range as you want to reflect your bookable work hours flexibly.

By specifying your work hours, you define your general availability which will be taken into consideration for every event template in your collections.

Just go to your FreeBusy Profile and configure your work hours.

2. Customize your availability for Meeting

Use this event template to express your regular availability for a type of meeting. For example if you are available on every Mon-Wed-Fri from 8:00 AM - 2:00 PM and on Tue 3:00 PM - 5:00 PM you can express that using this event template.

You can also limit your availability between certain dates.

If you want to share very specific times with your potential guests, use signup sheet.

To edit availability for event template, follow these steps.

Step 1 : Click "edit" on event template where you want to update your availability.

Step 2 : Navigate to panel 3 that says "when are you generally available for the meeting?"

Step 3 : Update your availability for the event template

Availability between certain dates : With this setting you can open your regular availability between certain dates. For example, As a counsellor, from 1 Dec 2021 to 15 Dec 2021 you wish to take open your availability for Free 1:1 Sessions for Mental health. You can set your start and end date and times you are available for these sessions.

Important note : You can only customize your availability within the time-range specified in your work hours.

If you want to extend working hours, go back to your profile and modify working hours time-range.

3. Ensure timeslots are listed on your booking page as per your desired time increments.

We by default set the timeslot increments for your booking page based on duration of your event template. You can customize it to suit your requirements.

Given you have duration of the meeting as 30 minutes, on your booking page timeslots will be listed every 30 minutes between your available hours. Like if your available time is 9 am to 11 am. Slots will be listed as 9.00 am, 9:30 am, 10:00 am ... 10:30 am.

FreeBusy allows you to customize this. For example if you want that your 30 min meeting starts from top of the hour, follow these steps.

Step 1 : Go to panel 4 that says "How long this meeting will last?"

Step 2 : Select 60 minutes from Meeting starts every dropdown.

Step 3 : Click on "Save"

Important note : Your selection in "Meeting starts every" also impacts on how granular your time picker grid is when you pick available times.

For example, if you have 10 minutes selected in "Meeting starts every", the time picker will allow you to pick times in 10 minute increments on the Grid.

4. Guarded Availability

If you don't want to expose your calendar availability and want to manually add free time-range directly on you calendar (and automatically show the rest of your time as busy), you can select Guarded Availability.

Step 1 : Click on "Edit" on event template.

Step 2 : Go to Panel 3 : "When are you generally available for this meeting?".

Step 3 : Check "Advance Availability Control" checkbox and turn on "Guarded `Availability"

When you turn on Guarded Availability you will not be shown available within the times that you have selected unless you put event named "#free" on your calendar from where FreeBusy reads your availability.

By adding #free time in your calendar, FreeBusy will show you available for meetings only those specified free slots.

Learn how to add free time slots in your calendar, in this article we use Google calendar but you can put similar #free events on any connected calendar.

If you have any questions & feedback, feel free to use the chat button. We're super friendly and happy to solve any scheduling challenge.

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