Weekly availability answers one question: which hours am I generally free. It is the first setting anyone touches, and most people either open the whole week out of politeness or paste in vague hours they do not actually keep. Both produce a page that books time you did not mean to give away.
Decide willing, not just free
Free and bookable are not the same thing. You might be technically free at 7pm and still not want a client call then. Weekly availability should reflect the hours you are willing to be booked, which is usually a narrower and more honest set than every gap in your calendar.
Set hours by day, not one blanket rule
Availability is set per day of the week, each with its own toggle and its own time range, not one rule stretched across every day. That matters because most weeks are not uniform: Tuesdays and Thursdays might be client days, Mondays might be admin only, weekends off entirely. Turn a day off completely rather than leaving it open with hours you will decline anyway; a day that is off does not show up as bookable at all, which is cleaner than hours you plan to reject.
Set your timezone once, then forget it
Your hours are interpreted in a single timezone you set once, and every visitor sees them converted into their own automatically. You never re-enter hours when you travel or when a client is on another continent; you set your zone correctly and the conversion happens on every page view. The mechanics behind that are covered in scheduling across time zones.
Let calendar sync do the fine cutting
Weekly availability sets the outer boundary of a normal week. It does not know about the dentist appointment on Thursday at 3. That is what calendar sync is for: it reads your connected calendar and removes the specific slots you are actually busy, inside the hours you already opened. Set the wide rule here, then let sync handle the exceptions rather than trying to predict every busy afternoon in advance; more on why that combination matters in how to prevent double booking.
A starting point, if you are not sure
- •Two or three days a week, not all five, if you also do focused work that needs protecting.
- •A four-hour window per open day. Enough to fill a week, narrow enough to feel deliberate.
- •Nothing before your actual morning routine ends. Slots you would groggily regret saying yes to are not real availability.
The four settings that come next
Weekly hours are the easy part. What happens inside them, buffers between sessions, how much notice you need, how far ahead someone can book, is a separate layer covered fully in buffers, minimum notice, and booking windows. Set your week here first; that post is where a good week becomes a week that actually holds.
Set it once, revisit rarely
Availability should change when your actual life changes, not every time you feel behind. Set hours you can keep for a season, connect your calendar so the exceptions handle themselves, and stop touching it. Set yours up and the whole thing takes about two minutes.