Stop emailing about times: set up a booking page

The scheduling email is a small tax that everybody pays. Three messages to find a time, one to confirm it, and one more when somebody realises it clashes. For anything you do repeatedly — office hours, demos, interviews, consultations — a booking page removes it entirely.

What a booking page actually is#

It is a public URL: /book/ followed by a handle you choose. Anyone with that link sees a page with your name, a short description, and a set of times you are free. They pick one, enter their name and email, and it is booked.

The important word is *free*. The page does not show a static timetable. Every time it loads, it works out your open slots by taking your weekly availability, cutting it into slots, and then removing everything that collides with a meeting already on your RoundMeet schedule — including recurring ones. A slot that shows up is a slot you can actually take.

Setting one up#

1. Pick a handle#

This becomes the public URL, so pick something you would be happy putting in an email signature. Short and human beats clever.

2. Set your weekly availability#

Availability is expressed as windows on days of the week — Monday 10:00–13:00, Tuesday 15:00–18:00, and so on. You can have several windows on the same day, which is how you protect a lunch break: two windows with a gap, not one long one.

These are in your timezone, and that is stored on the page rather than being inferred. It is what makes a 9:00 slot stay at 9:00 when clocks change at either end — if the windows were stored in UTC, half your slots would drift by an hour twice a year.

3. Set the four numbers#

Two of these are worth more thought than they usually get.

Minimum notice is the one that protects your morning. At the default of two hours, nobody can book the 9:00 slot at 8:45. Set it to a full day if you need to prepare for whatever the meeting is; leave it short if the point of the page is to be reachable.

Buffer is the one people skip and then regret. With a zero buffer, back-to-back bookings are genuinely back-to-back: the second meeting starts the second the first one ends, on a page that will happily book you six of them in a row. Ten or fifteen minutes is usually the difference between a useful day and an unbroken one.

Maximum advance mostly protects against being committed to something three months out that you have entirely forgotten about by the time it arrives.

4. Decide which room it uses#

Two options:

• A new room each booking (the default). Every meeting gets its own room code. Two bookings can never collide, and a link from a past meeting is dead.
• Your personal room. Every booking uses the same room. Convenient if it is always you and the link never changes — but if a meeting runs long, the next guest arrives in the middle of it.

Unless you have a reason, take the default.

5. Turn on the protections you want#

The booking page can pre-arm the meeting it creates: require the access token, or switch the lobby on so you approve each guest when they arrive. For anything with strangers in it — and a public booking page is by definition open to strangers — the lobby is the one worth having. See three ways to keep strangers out of your meeting for what each control does.

What happens when someone books#

A real scheduled meeting is created — the same kind you would have made yourself. The title combines your page's title with the guest's name, so your schedule reads *Office hours — Priya Sharma* rather than a wall of identical entries.

Both sides are invited: the guest gets an email invite with a calendar attachment they can add in one click, and you are invited to your own meeting so it lands in your schedule and you get the reminders. The slot then disappears from the page, because the collision check that generated it now sees a meeting there.

Making it work in practice#

Give the page a description that sets expectations. "30-minute intro call — tell me what you're building" gets better meetings than a blank page. The description is the only briefing your guest gets.

Do not offer all your working hours. A page offering 9-to-6 five days a week will fill in with things that could have been email. Offer the hours you actually want to spend this way.

Use separate pages for different things. A 15-minute intro call and a 60-minute review want different slot lengths, different notice periods and different descriptions. Two handles is cheaper than one page that fits neither.

Check the timezone before you share it. It is the setting people get wrong, and the failure is silent: everything works, everyone shows up an hour off.

The short version#

Set your weekly windows in your own timezone, give yourself a buffer and a real notice period, take the default of a fresh room per booking, and turn the lobby on. Then send the link instead of the email.