1. Help Center
  2. Using Calendly
  3. Best Practices

New user guide

Welcome to Calendly! 👋

We’ve put together a few simple steps for you to set up your account and book your first meeting.

We’ll walk you through the following steps:

  1. Set up your profile
  2. Connect your calendar
  3. Connect your video conferencing tool
  4. Create your schedule(s)
  5. Create/edit your event type and test the invitee experience
  6. Share your booking link
  7. Access Calendly anywhere

Let’s jump in!

Step 1: Set up your profile

Create your account through the email invitation from notifications@calendly.com and head over to your Personal Settings page.

Under Profile, update your photo, name and welcome message, which will show on your booking page when people schedule with you. Think of your booking page as a first introduction with your invitees.

Account_Settings_Profile_details.png

💡Tips:

  • Photo: Some users use their LinkedIn photo to keep their branding uniform.
  • Name: Feel free to add your role or company to your name, like “Lisa from Calendly.”
  • Welcome message: Your message will show on your booking page above all your event types so make sure it’s informative and broad enough to apply to all events.

Under the My link section, modify your personal Calendly link to share for bookings.

Screenshot 2023-08-07 at 9.39.10 AM.png

Note:  You’ll have to update your invitees with your new link if you modify it after sharing.

Step 2: Connect your calendar

Connecting your calendar is a key part of scheduling. When you connect your calendar, Calendly can:

  • Accurately show your availability to invitees
  • Check for ‘Busy’ events on your connected calendar to avoid double bookings
  • Add events to your calendar

Connecting your calendar

To connect your calendar, navigate to your Calendar Connections page. You can connect any of the following calendar platforms:

Calendar_connections_page.png

Select the “+ Add Calendar Account” button to connect your calendar. If you already see a calendar connected, you may have already connected it during your sign-up process.

With your calendar connected, Calendly will automatically display your available times on your booking page—no need to manually check your calendar for availability! 

Adding events to your calendar

Depending on your plan, connect up to 6 calendars to your account; however, Calendly can only add scheduled events to one calendar. Choose which calendar that is under the “Add to Calendar” section then select “Edit”.

No calendar?

If you don’t want to connect a calendar, you can manually enter your availability in Calendly from the Hours and preferences page. However, features like notifications and checking for conflicts won’t be available since Calendly won't be automatically syncing your availability from your calendar.

Step 3: Add video conferencing

Let’s check out the Integrations page.

Integrations_page_options.png

You’ll see lots of integrations on this page, from analytics tools to scheduling extensions. Let's focus specifically on an important part of the meeting process: video conferencing.

You can connect with the following video conferencing options:

  • Zoom
  • Google Meet
  • Microsoft Teams Conferencing
  • Webex
  • GoTo Meeting

Adding video conferencing

On the Integrations page, select your video conferencing platform and log in. In this example, your page will look something like this after connecting Zoom:

Zoom_Setup.png

Once connected, make sure to go to your event types where you'll be using video conferencing, and choose your video conferencing platform as the location. We'll also go over this in Step 5: Create/edit your event type.

Add_ZOOMMM.png

💡Tip:

  • For one-on-one event types, you don't have to select just one location—you can connect with multiple video conferencing platforms to give your invitees options.

Now that you've completed your account setup, let's move on to the scheduling set up, so invitees can book with you!

Step 4: Edit your event type

On your homepage, you’ll notice a pre-built event type with a set duration. Think of an event type as a meeting that you’ll schedule regularly, like a product demo, customer call, or office hours.

Choose to either:

Creating a new event type

On your homepage, select the “+ Create” button. Select Event type.

From here, you’ll see a few different options:

New_event_type.png

*Note: Collective event types available on Professional plan and above, and Round Robin event types are available on the Teams plan and above.

The most popular option is the one-on-one, so we will create this event type throughout the example below.

Next, let’s customize your event type (for now, skip the Editing an existing event type section below).

Editing an existing event type

Let’s go ahead and edit an event type to meet your scheduling needs (don’t worry, you can edit the title and duration in the next step).

To edit an existing event type, go to your Home page and click into an event type or click on the toggle icon in the upper right hand corner of the event and select “Edit”.Screen_Shot_2022-12-12_at_1.17.56_PM.png

Customizing your event type

In the “What event is this?” section, be sure to set the following:

  • Event name
  • Location
  • Description

If you’ve already connected a video conferencing tool, you’ll want to choose it as your location (unless it is a phone call, in person event, etc):

Mutliple_location_options_.png

💡Tip:

  • For one-on-one event types, you can allow your invitee to pick how you meet by adding multiple location options.

In the “When can people book this event?” section, set your booking preferences.

When_can_people_book_this_event_.png

We’ll point out a few important settings:

  • Duration: Choose how long your event will be.
  • Schedule or custom hours: Pull in the schedule you set up in Step 4, or create custom hours. Custom hours are useful if you want hours that differ from what you’ve built so far.
  • Buffers: Add time before and after meetings to build in breaks.

Invitee questions

Another feature to point out is the “Invitee questions” section, where you can add up to ten questions to your booking page. This is useful if you want to gather more information about your invitee.

Invitee_questions.png

There are more settings within the event type, but we’ll focus on these for now. We recommend taking a look at the Additional rules for your availability, if you’d like to:

  • Limit daily bookings
  • Prevent last-minute bookings
  • Set the frequency of available times
  • Lock the timezone for in-person events

:eyes: View your booking page and test the invitee experience

Now that you’ve made these changes, let’s see what your booking page looks like! Within your event type, select “View live page.”

View_live_page.png

This is the page your invitees will see when you send them your Calendly link. Try selecting a date and time, and book a time with yourself to test the scheduling process before sharing with invitees! Edit your event type as needed to fine-tune any settings.

💡Tip:

  • If you’re noticing any availability issues, use the Troubleshoot tool at the bottom of the page to understand how (and which) settings are affecting your availability.

troubleshoot_tool.png

:question_mark: Questions? These resources may help:

Step 5: Create your schedule

Calendly looks at your availability from two main places to calculate when you can accept new meetings:

  1. Your connected calendar, like Google, Outlook, etc.
  2. Your listed hours and preferences

Screen_Shot_2022-12-12_at_1.03.39_PM.png

In this step, we'll build out a Calendly schedule to tailor your available hours. It's a good idea to set up a schedule if you want to limit your availability on certain days, or only take meetings during certain windows. In other words, schedules allow you to narrow down when people can book with you.

Creating a schedule

Let’s go to the Availability page. Here, create a new schedule or edit your default hours.

Setting unavailable hours

You’ll notice that you can remove hours from some days or block entire days altogether. If you want to remove a day, you can deselect it, or use the trash icon.

In this case, we’ve marked Friday as ‘Unavailable’, since we don’t want to accept any meetings on Friday.

Friday_is_unavailable_schedule.png

Adding time intervals

Use the “+” button to add more time intervals if you want to accept meetings during a specific time period each day:

multiple_intervals_schedule.png

Once you're happy with your schedule, apply your schedule to any event types that need these times.

active_on_schedule.png

Date override

If there are hours or days that don't adhere to your usual schedule, set a date override. Date overrides are for times that don’t follow a pattern, like holidays or days you know you won’t be in office.

💡Tip:

  • Create multiple schedules for different use cases, events, and more.

:question_mark: Questions? These resources may help:

Step 6: Share your booking link

Woohoo! Now that you’ve done all the hard work of setting up your account and event type, you’re ready to share your availability. You have a few ways to share your available times with invitees.

The first option is to share your landing page link, which includes all active event types for your invitee to choose from. This is the link we looked at when editing your profile in Step 1.

💡Tip:

  • If you don’t want an event to appear on your booking page for all users to see, mark it as a secret event in the “Additional rules for availability” section in the event settings. The event will then only be seen when you share the link directly with an invitee.

 Copy your landing page link from your homepage, under your name:

 

book_page_link.png

The second option is to share your event link, if you want your invitee to book a specific event type - access it from the “Share” button on your event types:

Share_button.png

When you select the “Share” button, you also have the option to 

Step 7: Access Calendly anywhere

Download web extensions and plug-ins

Share your Calendly links from any web page or from your inbox using extensions - great scheduling shortcuts. Find the Chrome Extension or other preferred extensions here. 

Within any of the browser extensions, you’ll see all the events you’ve created. Share your booking links, add specific time slots to emails, and create one-off meetings—from any web page. And, the Gmail inbox extension allows you to share links directly from your email, so you never need to leave your inbox.

Note: The Calendly extensions work with Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Outlook, and LinkedIn.

Mobile

Want to access your events on the go and easily share your Calendly link in person? Download the Calendly Mobile app iOS or Android. Find more resources for the mobile app here.

:question_mark: Questions? These resources may help:

What's next?

Thanks for following along! Calendly has a ton of additional functionality, from meeting polls to Workflows. To keep exploring and learning about Calendly, check out the following:

Support and troubleshooting resources