Setting Your Availability: Weekly Hours and Date Overrides

Availability is what makes StretchSchedule show only times you're genuinely free. It combines weekly working hours, date overrides, buffers, and existing bookings to compute open slots. This article covers how to set it up.

Schedules and timezones

An availability schedule is a named set of hours anchored to one timezone. Everything else — the slots invitees see — is computed from that timezone and then displayed in each invitee's local time. You can keep several schedules (for example, Sales hours and Office hours) and mark one as the default that new event types use.

Step 1: Create a schedule

1. Open Availability and choose New schedule.
2. Give it a title (e.g. Work hours).
3. Set the timezone (e.g. America/Toronto). Choose this carefully — it's the anchor for every slot.
4. Optionally set status to active and toggle default on.

Step 2: Add weekly windows

For each day you take meetings, add one or more windows with a start and end time:

1. Choose the day (Mon–Sun).
2. Set start time and end time in HH:MM (e.g. 09:00–12:00).
3. Add a second window for the same day to model a lunch break (e.g. 09:00–12:00 and 13:00–17:00).
4. Mark windows active; leave days you don't work without windows.

You can define up to 80 windows across a schedule, so complex weeks (split shifts, half-days) are fully supported.

Step 3: Add date overrides

Overrides handle exceptions to your normal week. Each override targets a specific date and has a type:

• Unavailable — block the whole day (holiday, PTO).
• Available — open a day you'd normally have off.
• Custom hours — replace that day's hours with a specific start/end.

Add an optional note (e.g. "Company holiday") for your own reference. You can add up to 120 overrides per schedule.

How slots are computed

When an invitee views a booking page, StretchSchedule builds open slots by taking your weekly windows, applying any overrides for the dates in view, subtracting existing bookings and their buffers, and then hiding anything that violates minimum notice or falls outside the booking window. The invitee only ever sees times that satisfy all of these at once.

A realistic example

A clinic runs Mon–Fri, 08:00–16:00 in America/Vancouver, with a lunch break:

1. Create schedule Clinic hours, timezone America/Vancouver, default on.
2. For Mon–Fri add two windows each: 08:00–12:00 and 13:00–16:00.
3. Add an unavailable override for the December 25 holiday with note "Closed."
4. Add a custom hours override for one Saturday (10:00–13:00) for a special clinic day.

Invitees now see morning and afternoon slots on weekdays, nothing over lunch, no times on Dec 25, and a limited Saturday window.

Multiple schedules in practice

Point different event types at different schedules. Your Intro Call might use Sales hours (mornings only), while Deep Work Office Hours uses a separate afternoon-only schedule. This lets one calendar serve very different meeting types cleanly.

Tips

• Model breaks as gaps, not overrides — two windows with a gap is the simplest way to protect lunch every day.
• Set your default schedule before creating event types so they inherit the right hours.
• Use custom-hours overrides sparingly for one-off changes; for recurring changes, edit the weekly windows instead.
• Re-check after travel. If you change timezones seasonally, confirm the schedule's timezone still matches how you work.

Troubleshooting

• No slots appear at all. The schedule likely has no active weekly windows, or overrides/minimum-notice are excluding every candidate time. Add at least one active window and widen the booking window.
• A blocked day still shows times. Confirm the override date matches the schedule the event type actually uses — overrides live on a specific schedule.
• Times are shifted by hours. The schedule's timezone is probably wrong. Fix it and re-test in a private window.