Everybody needs to block off time that’s unavailable for meetings. If you don’t control your schedule, it will control you ⏳. FreeBusy is a scheduling assistant that helps you share your availability as a booking link to get meetings scheduled 10x faster.
If you haven’t tried it already, FreeBusy helps you eliminate the entire email back-and-forth to schedule meetings. It calculates availability from all your calendars to ensure you are never double booked.
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Block time from your calendar
Now it is important that FreeBusy does not show you available during your preferred lunch hours or during the holidays. So the easiest way to go about it, is mark yourself busy and block off time that’s unavailable for meetings.
Here is how you could block your calendar for the two most popular calendars:
For Google Calendar
1. Open Google Calendar
2. Drag to create a new event for the times you want to block off. Add a suggestive title, “Lunch time” in our case.
3. Click “More options”, mark yourself as “Busy” and make the event recurrent.
4. Click “Save” and you’re done. You marked yourself unavailable for meetings during lunch time.
For Outlook Calendar
Here’s a quick video on how to achieve this in Outlook. Its the same steps as the above.
Once this is done, it reflects automatically in your FreeBusy booking, hence guests would not be able to book at lunch times and holidays created in your calendar.
Limit availability time ranges with work hours and event templates
For example, instead of accepting meeting invites for whenever people send them, you may block off Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for working on tasks and leave Tuesday and Thursday open for people to schedule meetings.
You can do this by configuring your work hours and further fine tune your availability for every event template, if needed.
Configure availability time ranges
Advanced: don’t clutter main calendar
If you want to block off time for appointment booking purposes without cluttering your main calendar you can create a separate calendar that’s just for time blocks/external meetings/appointment booking. You’ll then create the blocks on that separate calendar which you can toggle it on and off from the left sidebar in your calendar app when you want to show/hide it.
Create a new calendar in Google Calendar
Create a new calendar in Outlook
After you create (or delete) calendars and go to FreeBusy Calendar Integrations and tell it to also check (or not) the newly created calendar.
Advanced: Manually select when you are available for meetings
If you don’t want to offer all of the available times on your calendar for scheduling meetings, consider using Guarded Availability. Instead of blocking off times you’re not available, you’ll create blocks of time on your calendar that will indicate you are available for booking (manually mark when you are free). You can manage the availability you offer to your clients directly on your linked calendar.
To show available at specific times, add “Free” events on your calendar.
Learn how to use Guarded availability
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