Performance Reviews. Budget Meetings. Advisory Sessions. Chances are, there's some kind of recurring event (or, more likely, several kinds!) where you want to make yourself available for others to book an appointment with you. Google Calendar has had appointment-booking functionality for quite a while and in this article, I'm going to show you how it works.
Create an Appointment Time:
1. First, find a block of time on your Google Calendar where you'd like to make yourself available for appointments. Click on your calendar to create the Appointment slot, then choose the hard-to-see option "Appointment Slots" in the dialog box:
2. Give your appointment schedule a title, then click the blue 'Continue' button.
2. Next up, you'll make some decisions about this new appointment booking schedule. First of all, how long are the slots going to be?
3. Now set your availability: when do you want to to be available for appointment booking? First, you can decide if these booking slots repeat weekly or not. Next, select the time on each weekday when you'll be available for appointments.
4. When do you want your appointment calendar to be available? How far in advance can an appointment be booked? Do you want to prevent last-minute bookings? From the next pane down, you can adjust these settings.
5. Need to add some ad-hoc appointment blocks, say for just a given date? The 'Adjusted availability' feature allows you to set these up.
6. The final group of settings lets you add buffer between bookings and also change the color of your booking schedule on your calendar. I think this is a nice feature: setting a limit for bookings each day can help prevent you from becoming over-burdened.
7. After clicking 'Next', you get another pane of options that allow you to customize how your booking calendar appears to your recipients. You can add a location or videoconference link, but not both, unfortunately.
8. When customizing your Booking form, you can require folks to provide email verification when making a booking. I highly recommend enabling this, to reduce spam bookings from taking up your calendar.
After you're finished dialing in all these settings, click 'Save'.
Share and Manage your Bookings
Now that you've created a booking schedule, it will look something like this on your Google Calendar:
Note that to your colleagues and anyone else who has access to your calendar, you'll still appear as 'free' during this time.
To share this booking schedule with others, click on the event, then tap the 'Share' button:
Then send the sharing link to your recipient.
Once the bookings start rolling in, you'll start getting messages letting you know. You'll also start seeing the appointment slots fill in with a solid color on your calendar:
For the Recipients:
Your recipients, when they click on the link to your booking page, will see the available appointment slots appear.
To book a time slot, they just need to click on one, enter any information you requested in your 'form' section, then click "Book".
