Tutorial: Share Your Availability in 30 Seconds

The problem this solves

A client messages you: "When can we meet this week?" Simple question. But if your meetings are spread across three calendars, answering it means opening each one, mentally overlaying the busy blocks, subtracting the conflicts, accounting for buffer time, and producing a coherent list of free slots. That process takes 5 to 10 minutes and you might still miss a conflict buried in the third calendar you forgot to check.

manyCalendars's Share Availability feature does this in one click. It reads every event across every connected calendar, computes your true free time, and generates a plain-text block you can paste into Slack, email, or a text message. No scheduling links. No accounts for the other person to create. No revealing which clients you work for or what your meetings are about.

Step 1: Open Share Availability

In the manyCalendars sidebar, find the Quick Actions section. Click Share Availability. A modal opens with three controls at the top: Range, Hours, and Timezone.

Range lets you choose the window: this week, next week, or the next two weeks. Default is "This week" which covers Monday through Friday of the current week.

Hours sets your working window. Default is 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM. If you work 8 to 6, adjust it here. Only free time within this window will be shown. Early morning and evening hours are excluded by default so you do not accidentally offer a 7 AM slot.

Timezone is auto-detected from your system settings. If you are in New York, it will default to Eastern (NYC). If your client is in a different timezone and you want to send times in their local time, switch the dropdown. The times in the output will convert automatically.

Step 2: Review the output

The text area below the controls updates instantly as you change settings. It shows your free slots in a clean, readable format:

I'm available (Eastern (NYC)):
  Mon 6/1: 10am - 11:30am, 2pm - 4pm
  Tue 6/2: 9am - 10am, 1pm - 3pm
  Wed 6/3: 11am - 12pm, 3pm - 5pm
  Thu 6/4: 9am - 11am
  Fri 6/5: 10am - 12pm, 2pm - 5pm

A few things to notice about the output:

It only shows free time. Your meetings, their titles, their clients, their details are not included. The recipient sees when you are available, not why you are busy.

Slots shorter than 15 minutes are filtered out. A 10-minute gap between meetings is not useful for scheduling. manyCalendars removes these automatically so you do not offer a slot that cannot fit a real meeting.

The timezone label is included. The first line reads "I'm available (Eastern (NYC))" so the recipient knows exactly what timezone the times refer to. No ambiguity, no follow-up questions.

Days with no free time are omitted. If Wednesday is wall-to-wall meetings, it simply does not appear in the list. Clean and clear.

Step 3: Copy and send

Click the Copy to Clipboard button at the bottom of the modal. The entire text block is copied. Paste it into your Slack DM, your email reply, or wherever the scheduling conversation is happening.

The whole process, from clicking Share Availability to pasting the result, takes under 30 seconds. Compare that to the 5 to 10 minute manual cross-referencing routine, and the time savings are immediately obvious. Over a week of frequent scheduling, this feature alone can save 30 minutes or more.

Tips for power users

Use timezone conversion for international clients. If your client is in London and you are in Chicago, switch the timezone dropdown to "London" before copying. The output will show your free slots converted to GMT/BST so the client does not have to do the math. You are still blocking based on your actual local schedule. Only the display changes.

Narrow the hours for specific clients. If Client A's team only works 10 AM to 3 PM their time, adjust the Hours inputs to match that overlap window before generating. You will only see slots that work for both sides.

Use "Next 2 weeks" for longer scheduling horizons. If someone is trying to book something next week, the two-week view gives them more options and reduces the back-and-forth.

Refresh your calendars first. If meetings have been added recently, hit the refresh button before opening Share Availability. This ensures the free-slot computation includes any meetings added in the last few minutes.

Why this beats scheduling links

Tools like Calendly and Cal.com solve a similar problem, but they work differently. They generate a link that the other person clicks to see your available slots and book directly. This is great for sales teams and public booking pages. It is less great for contractors managing multiple clients.

Scheduling links require an account and setup. You need to connect your calendars to their platform, configure availability rules, and maintain the integration. If you have three calendars across different providers, the setup is not trivial.

Scheduling links send your data to a server. Your calendar events are synced to a third-party cloud to compute availability. For privacy-conscious professionals, that is a meaningful trade-off.

Scheduling links can feel impersonal. Sending a Calendly link to a client who just asked "when are you free?" can feel transactional. A quick text block pasted into the conversation feels human and responsive.

Scheduling links only see the calendars you connect. If you forget to connect Calendar C, the scheduling tool does not know about those meetings. manyCalendars sees every calendar that is open in your browser, so the availability it generates is always complete.

Plain-text availability is low-tech on purpose. It works everywhere: Slack, email, iMessage, WhatsApp, a comment in Jira. No links to click, no accounts to create, no platform lock-in. Just times and a timezone. Install manyCalendars free and try it.