A booking page replaces the two or three emails it takes to agree a time. It works by publishing an answer to one question — when am I free — without answering any of the others, which is a narrower thing to share than it first appears.
A booking page is a link that shows your real free time and lets someone claim a slot, which then appears in both calendars. It replaces proposing times by email, and it is always current because it reads the calendar rather than a list you typed.
No. It shows only whether each slot is free or taken — the same information as free-busy sharing, and nothing about what you are doing.
Set a buffer before and after each meeting type, so the page never offers a slot that touches another. Relying on people to leave gaps means the gaps disappear.
Set a minimum notice — commonly four hours or a full day — so the earliest bookable slot is never in an hour. It is the single most useful booking setting, and the one most often left off.
Two to four weeks for most work. A rolling window prevents a calendar being claimed months out by people who will cancel, and it makes no promises about a schedule you cannot predict.
Yes, with a daily cap, and it is worth setting. Without one, a single busy day can absorb a week's worth of calls purely because that day happened to look empty.
A meeting type is a named, reusable kind of booking — a 15-minute intro, a 45-minute review — with its own duration, buffers and questions. Publishing two or three types is usually better than one generic slot.
Often, yes. Publishing a narrow window for cold enquiries and a wider one for your team is done with two meeting types rather than by policing the calendar afterwards.
A booking page should check availability at the moment of booking and refuse the slot if it has gone. A page that only checks when it loads produces double bookings on busy calendars.
It should. Time you have blocked for focus or a routine is time you are not available, and a booking page that only reads meetings will offer it away.
Send three specific slots with zones, not a description of your week. 'Tuesday 14:00 or 16:00 London, Wednesday 09:00 London' can be answered in one word; 'I'm free most afternoons' cannot.
The time in the booker's own zone, the duration, how to join, and how to cancel or reschedule. Omitting the cancellation link is how no-shows become silent.
Send a reminder the day before and make rescheduling one click. Most no-shows are people who cannot find how to move it, not people who chose not to come.
Ask one: what they want to cover. It is enough to prepare, short enough not to deter booking, and it makes a surprising number of calls unnecessary.
The visitor's own, detected from their browser, with a way to change it. Showing slots in the owner's zone pushes the arithmetic onto the person you want to make it easy for.
Yes — a round-robin page books whoever is free, and a collective page offers only times when everyone is free. The first spreads load; the second is for meetings that genuinely need the whole group.
Block the day explicitly rather than trusting the calendar to know. Public holidays differ by country and a booking page will happily offer a slot on one it has never heard of.
A scheduling conflict is two commitments claiming the same time. The ones that matter are usually invisible: a meeting over a routine, or over work you had planned but never wrote down.
No, and declining with a reason and an alternative is a normal professional act. An accepted meeting you resent is worse for everyone than a declined one with a suggestion attached.
As much as you have, and more than a few hours where you can. Rescheduling 24 hours out is administration; rescheduling 20 minutes out has usually already cost the other person their morning.
Meeting load is the proportion of working hours spent in meetings. Measuring it is the only way to have a useful conversation about it, and most people guess theirs low.
Block it before it fills, as a repeating event that reads as busy, and defend it by rescheduling into other days rather than into it. A no-meeting day declared but not blocked lasts about two weeks.
Shorter than the default. Booking 25 and 50 minutes instead of 30 and 60 gives everyone a gap between calls and rarely costs anything in content.
Because calendars are drawn in those blocks, not because the work takes that long. The grid is a drawing convention that quietly became a norm.
Yes, as a real event. Travel that is not on the calendar is time that is available to be booked, and it is the most common cause of arriving late to something you accepted honestly.
Ask which days they work and record it in their availability rather than remembering it. A part-time colleague's non-working days are invisible on a calendar that shows only events.
Free time is what is not booked; availability is what you are willing to have booked. They are different numbers, and publishing the first as if it were the second is how calendars fill up completely.
It should read every calendar you keep — work and personal — to decide what is free, while showing details from none of them. Checking only the work calendar is how a dentist appointment gets double-booked.
As early as possible, with a reason and a specific alternative time. 'Let's reschedule' without a time puts the work of rebooking on the person you cancelled.
Yes, as an offer rather than an instruction. 'Book a time if it's easier' reads well; a link with no words around it reads like a queue ticket.
Daykite is a calendar that holds meetings, routines, tasks and goals together, with an assistant that shows you every change before it makes it. Free for one person.