29 Jan Creating appointment slots in Google Calendar

You may be familiar with making events in your Google Calendar, but have you ever used the appointment slots function? This allows you to block out bulk sections of your time, which people can then book appointments into, if you share the link with them. This is great for organising 1-2-1’s with your team. 

Firstly, you will need to head over to your calendar, and highlight the selected date and time range you want to make your appointment slots, as you would a normal calendar event. When the box pops up to let you create the event, you want to click on ‘Appointment slots’ in the top left corner.

If you’ve never used Appointment slots before, you may see this message, which provides you with a brief overview of what Appointment slots are and how they work. Click on ‘Get started with appointment slots’ to continue.

You will then see the following screen. You can set a title for your appointment slots, such as ‘Team Performance Reviews’, and amend the time and location. You can also choose to block book the appointment slots as one whole session, or to break it down into slots. We will leave it as the standard 30 minutes for this example.

Once you are finished, click ‘Save’ and the time will be reserved in your calendar.

When you go back into the event, you will be able to see a link for ‘This calendar’s appointment page’. This link can be shared with your team to allow them to book slots into your schedule.

When you or any of your colleagues visit this link, they will see the below. Each team member can then pick a slot that suits them and their other arrangements, and click on the grey box to reserve the 30 minute slot.

The team member can then edit the title, such as add in their name, and they can choose to change the location or add additional details in the description box.

Once the appointment is saved, it will then appear as booked out in the team calendar view. This will also then add an additional appointment in your single view calendar, so that you can see who you are meeting and when.

This is a great tool when you are in demand to meet with a lot of people, but only have specific time slots available. You could share the appointment link with a range of people both inside and outside of your organisation, allowing people to book appointments with you based on a first come, first served basis.

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