Are you tired of colleagues scheduling meetings outside your working hours? Google Calendar has a solution for you! By setting your working hours in the Calendar Settings, you can let people in your organization know when you are unavailable. And the best part? They will see a moon label next to your name when they try to schedule a meeting outside your working hours.
See the little moon next to the example email address? That shows that the proposed meeting is outside that person's pre-set working hours.
However, you might have noticed that you can't see those greyed-out blocks indicating your working hours in your own calendar. This can be inconvenient if you need to set up time with someone outside your organization. But fear not, there is a workaround!
How to Work Around the Issue
To see your working hours in your Google Calendar, follow these steps:
- Click on "Create / Event" on your Calendar (desktop or laptop only).
- Then click on "Find a time."
The event creation box will dock to the left-hand side of your screen, and you will see sections of the day cross-hatched out. These cross-hatched sections indicate the times of the day when you are not available, according to your pre-set working hours.
Now you can confidently schedule your meetings, knowing that you won't violate your pre-set working hours.
FAQ About Working Hours
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Does this work if someone outside my organization is inviting me to an event? No, if someone outside your organization tries to schedule a meeting outside your normal working hours, they won't see any warning messages, even if they are also using Google Calendar.
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Can I automatically decline meetings sent outside my working hours? No, you can't automatically decline such meetings. However, you can use the Out of Office feature (available to Business Standard and Business Plus users) if you want to automatically decline meetings.
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Why can't I see an option to set Working Hours in my Google Calendar settings? There are two reasons for this: You might be using the free version of Google Calendar, which doesn't support this feature, or your administrator hasn't turned it on. If you're the administrator and want to enable this feature, navigate to Admin console > Apps > Google Workspace > Calendar Sharing Settings. There, under "Working Hours," you'll see the checkbox: "Allow users to set working hours." Enable the feature by clicking the checkbox and then click on "Save."
Need Personalized Assistance?
I hope this article was helpful, but if you need more personalized help, feel free to get in touch. I specialize in helping small business owners like you work better with Google Workspace, saving time and money by streamlining your business processes, increasing productivity, and improving client and employee communications.
