Your availability

Before you publish anything, tell the system when you are willing to be booked. Get this right once and every booking page you make afterwards inherits it.

Set your timezone first

Open Settings from the dashboard and set your timezone. Everything else depends on it — your weekly hours are stored in your timezone, and each visitor sees the slots converted to theirs. A participant in another timezone picks 2 PM their time and it lands correctly on your calendar.

If you travel for a semester, change this setting rather than shifting your hours by hand.

Weekly hours

Open Availability. You get a grid of the seven days; for each one, either mark it unavailable or give it a start and end time. Monday to Friday, 9 AM to 5 PM is the starting point.

Two things people get wrong here:

• These are the outer limits, not a promise. Real meetings on your connected calendar carve slots out of this window. Set the window generously and let the calendar do the filtering.
• Leave yourself margin. If you set 9 to 5 and your first class is at 9, someone will book 9:00. Either start the window later or use a buffer on the booking page.

You can add more than one window in a day — for example 9 AM to noon and 2 PM to 4 PM, leaving your lunch and lab meeting alone.

Blocking specific dates (overrides)

Weekly hours can’t express “I’m at a conference the week of the 14th.” That’s what overrides are for. On a booking page, open Overrides and either:

• Block the whole day — no slots at all. Use it for travel, holidays, and days you simply don’t want interrupted.
• Set custom hours for that date — replace the normal weekly hours for one day, for example 8 AM to noon only because you’re teaching all afternoon.

Overrides beat the weekly hours for that date, and you can add several windows to a single date.

Connect your calendar

This is the step that stops double-booking. Open Sources and connect the calendar you actually live in. Once connected, anything already on it — classes, meetings, travel, a blocked-out writing morning — disappears from your bookable slots without you doing anything.

Two kinds of connection are supported:

• Google Calendar, through the usual Google sign-in flow.
• CalDAV, which covers most other calendars, including Nextcloud, Fastmail, iCloud, SOGo, Radicale, and Zimbra. You give it the server address and your credentials for that service.

After connecting, pick which of that account’s calendars should block your time. Most people want their main one and not, say, a subscribed holidays calendar.

You can also let confirmed bookings be written back to a calendar, so a booking made here shows up as a normal event in the calendar you already check every morning. Set that on the source. Cancelling the booking removes the event again.

Sync runs on its own. If a calendar looks stale, open its source and use the sync action to force a refresh.

When the slots look wrong

Every booking page has a Troubleshoot view. It lays out the next seven days and, for every slot it decided not to offer, says why: an existing calendar event, another booking, a buffer overlapping it, or the minimum-notice rule. Check that before assuming something is broken — the usual answer is a forgotten all-day event on a connected calendar.

The order the system applies is worth knowing, because it explains almost every surprise:

1. Start from your weekly hours, replaced by an override if that date has one.
2. Remove anything overlapping an event on a connected calendar.
3. Remove anything overlapping a booking you already have.
4. Remove slots where a required room or piece of equipment is already taken.
5. Apply the buffers before and after each slot.
6. Drop slots that are too soon, per the minimum notice.
7. Drop dates beyond the booking horizon.