Availability
A business term for being free and able to attend at a specific date and time, or the information showing it.
Availability refers to the time periods in which a person can attend a meeting or event. In the context of scheduling it is used synonymously with “free time” or “available hours,” and finding the time period where all participants’ availability overlaps is the essential purpose of scheduling.
Visualizing availability
Some calendar tools have a feature that displays team members’ availability in a single view.
An example setup for sharing availability
When sharing availability within a team, you might, for example, limit your calendar’s visibility setting to the “free/busy” level and keep the details of private events hidden. There are also scheduling tools that read the events published through calendar sharing and display everyone’s free time.
“Free” and “able to attend” are not the same
What is easily overlooked when dealing with availability is that a blank space on the calendar does not mean “able to attend.” Everyone has time that is not registered as an event but that they do not want meetings put into: focused work, travel, meals, right before leaving work, and so on. Scheduling that treats every blank on the calendar as bookable forces the other person into defensive calendar habits where “I cannot protect it unless I block it with an event first.”