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There are a number of add-ons and extensions and more expensive tools like Calendly, which will allow you to embed possible meeting times within your email. But did you know that you can do this absolutely for free within your Gmail account?
Here I am composing a new message. I'm wanting to meet with someone this week, but I don't want to waste my time going back and forth discovering our availability. I want to share the times that I would like to meet with this person and allow them to book that time in just a single click.
So after I've written maybe a brief introduction here, all I need to do is come down to the very bottom, select the more options, and at the very bottom we have the option here to set up a time to meet.
Now there's two options available here to us. Offer times that you're free or we can create an event. Now, this second option here is really no different than just creating an event within Google Calendar and then inviting them directly. So let's focus on this first one here.
By selecting this, what it's going to do is open up the Google side panel here on the right hand side and open up our calendar. You'll notice within the email it's got a bit of a placeholder and it's giving us some instructions. Select times in the calendar sidebar for a one one-to-one event.
So here on the right hand side, I've got a preview of my calendar, and all I need to do is click and drag any available times that I would like to offer. I'm going to move over to Wednesday here, and I'm going to say, well, I'm available between 10 and 12. I'm going to click and drag and then release. And here you can see it's added this placeholder.
I'm going to come down here in the afternoon. I'm going to do the same thing. Click and drag and then release. And here you can see down below it is showing the availability in which I have added.
Now if you want to change or if you've made a mistake, you can always remove one here. You can see is the X beside. I can remove that slot if I need to and if I want to change the duration, I can also click and drag. You'll notice these little white dots at the top and bottom.
So if I want to shorten this up, for example, I can do so there. If I want to maybe extend it all the way to nine 30, I can do so here as well. But let me go ahead and add a few more times. I'm going to go back and add that afternoon. I'm going to maybe go out to Friday and say that I'm also available early Friday morning, going to say seven to nine.
Now this does not mean that I'm requesting a two hour meeting. I'm simply offering my availability slots. - You'll see down below. By default, it's going to select a one hour meeting, but we can come in here and change that anywhere from 15 minutes to a custom duration. I'm going to say 30 minutes in this particular example. And you can even see in the little graphic up above, it's split it into 30 minute increments.
Now, down below, we can also edit and add things as well. You can see here if I wanted to change any of these times or add additional times on a particular day or simply remove it, I can do that down here as well. I just find it so much easier to click and drag.
Let's say I want to just move this entire block up from 6:00 AM to 8:00 AM I'm going to move it back here. I just find it so much easier to do.
So up here, this is much better for seeing sort of a summary of the available times that I'm going to offer when I'm happy adding my availability. I'm going to select this next button here, and now we can give this meeting a title. So maybe I'm going to call this one chat with Ted, maybe that's who I'm meeting with.
So I can give it any event title that I want. I can once again change the event duration. It's giving me sort of a second chance to change that event duration and then also review my availability as well.
Now, this isn't mandatory, but down below there is a more info area here I can add a specific location or conferencing information. If I select this dropdown, I can automatically add a Google Meet video conferencing link. I can say, actually, let's meet at this location and add an address. I could also say that this is going to be a phone call and that will require them to provide their phone number, or I can say none to be specified later.
Now, you may be asking yourself, well, what if I don't use Google Meet and you use something like Zoom, for example. Well, you could just come down here to the description and paste your Zoom link into this area as well. I'm just going to leave this blank in this particular example.
And the last step is to add it to my email. And now within my email, they can browse the available times and choose the one that is best suited for them.
Now, it may seem like there's a lot more available times here than what we selected, but remember we selected a number of 90 minute and two hour blocks and gave them half hour increments. So here are the half hour increments that you're seeing here on these two particular days.
Now you're probably wondering, does this only work with fellow Gmail users? And what does it look like to the end user? Let's go ahead and hit send on this email. And let me show you, we are now taking a look at what the receiver will see.
And as you can tell, yes, this does not just work for Gmail or other Google users, you can safely use this feature with - Anyone that you are wanting to meet with. In this example, I'm using outlook.com.
So I'm going to go ahead and open this email. And here you can see it's everything that we saw in our last screen, just the way that we set things up so they can come in here and browse the available times and say, yeah, you know, Wednesday at 2:00 PM that works for me.
If they click on that link in a new tab, they're going to be brought to this screen. Now, this is important because we want to confirm both their name and their email address for this particular event. This is especially helpful if for some reason that email got forwarded or sent to someone else.
So this is really just a confirmation step. And as mentioned before, if we had made this a phone call, they would also be required to input their phone number. At this stage, they can say, confirm.
Jumping back to my email here, you can see I have just received an email notification saying that this event has been confirmed for 2:00 PM and if I open up my Google calendar, here is this chat with Ted.
Here is that meeting event. Now, one key thing that you will want to remember when it comes to sending out your availability, like the one that we did here in this example, it will not reserve any of those times on your calendar, nor will it check for any double bookings.
So for example, we made ourselves available or gave this individual available times of 7:00 AM through 9:00 AM on Friday. If I went ahead and booked other meetings or blocked out times within this two hour frame and then they chose one of these slots, it would still proceed with booking that calendar event.
So I would recommend that you limit the number of options that you give to your recipients, and also make sure that these are times that are going to remain open or remain available at least within the next 24 hours, so that they can safely select that time and book a meeting with you.
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