If you need people to be able to schedule meetings with you that are unrelated to your job (hello fellow job-searchers!) and don’t show up on your work calendar, this post’s for you.
There are three steps to accomplishing this: (1) get all your conflict calendars into Google Calendar; (2) create one or more appointment schedules in Google Calendar which incorporate your conflict calendars; and (3) share your appoint schedule link(s) with people you need to meet with.
Getting other calendars into Google Calendar
The first step for getting another calendar into Google Calendar is to obtain an ICS link for it from the application hosting it. For example, here‘s how to do that with Microsoft Exchange.
Once you’ve got the link, you can either subscribe directly to it in Google Calendar, or set up a Google Apps Script to mirror the other periodically into a separate calendar within your Google account. The latter is more complicated but will ensure more timely updates. For example, when using the direct subscription method I’ve seen it take days for new events in the external calendar to be reflected in Google Calendar; whereas the Apps Scripts I use to mirror calendars ensure that events show up within 15 minutes.
Subscribing directly
In the Google Calendar web app:
- Click the gear icon and select “Settings”.
- Expand “Add calendar” on the left and click “From URL”.
- Enter the URL you obtained above (if it starts with “ical” or “ics” replace that with “https”) and click the “Add calendar” button.
Mirroring for faster updates
Go here and follow the instructions.
Setting up appointment schedules
In Google Calendar, click on the “Create” button and select “Appointment schedule”. Follow the prompts to create a schedule. Most importantly, make sure to expand the “Calendars” section near the bottom and select all of the calendars you want to be treated as conflicts when people are scheduling meetings with you (that’s why you went through the effort above to add them to Google Calendar!).
Once you’re done working through the schedule creation process and you click “Save”, a pop-up will appear with a share button you can use to share your booking link with others. More on that below.
You may want to create multiple appointment schedules. The most common reason for that would be if you want to offer people different meeting duration, e.g., I have a “30 minutes” schedule and a “1 hour” schedule. Or you may want to give only some people the option of scheduling you in the evening or on weekends.
Sharing appointment schedule links
Getting the sharing link
If you’ve created more than one appointment schedule, you can choose between sharing a link to a page which shows all your schedules and allows the user to choose which one to use, or sharing a link to a specific schedule.
To share a link to a specific schedule, find that schedule in your calendar by viewing one of the days where it’s active, click on it, click “Share” in the pop-up, and copy the link.
To share a link to a page showing all of your schedules, find any schedule in your calendar, click on it, click “Share”, select “All appointment schedules”, and copy the link.
Unfortunately, there’s no option for sharing a link to only a subset of your schedules, so if you want to do that, you’ll have to create a web page somewhere yourself for it. You may want to leverage the web page embed code accessible in the link sharing pop-up.
Shortening the sharing link
The sharing links generated by Google Calendar are a long and clunky (e.g., my current one is “https://calendar.app.google/GjRMUnK7ndjgUjnz8“). You may wish to shorten it to something that’s more memorable and easier to type for the people you’re hoping will schedule meetings with you.
Personally, since I host my own web server, I’ve accomplished this by putting a redirect rule in the server config, “RedirectMatch (?i)/meetwithjik https://calendar.app.google/GjRMUnK7ndjgUjnz8“, which means I can tell people, “Go to https://kamens.us/meetwithjik to schedule a meeting with me.”
You can also use bitly or some other link shortening service that will let you specify the end of the shortened link (if someone hasn’t already used the one you want) instead of making it a random string of characters.
How this works in day-to-day practice
Because meetings scheduled in this way are going onto your personal calendar rather than your work calendar (if you have one), when someone books a meeting with you through your link you do need to create a corresponding meeting on your work calendar to make sure you don’t get booked into a conflicting meeting. Depending on how frequently you get booked into meetings at work, you may need to keep an eye on your personal email throughout the day so you can block off new meetings quickly.
