What’s worse than not being able to get a meeting with someone? Getting a meeting request for a time when you’re not working. We can’t stop that, but we can help you set up Outlook so that at least people know your working hours.
When you create a meeting request in Outlook, the Meeting > Scheduling Assistant helps you find a time that you and the meeting request recipients are both free.
When you open the Scheduling Assistant, the hours shown for each day aren’t from midnight to midnight, though; they’re from 8 am to 5 pm.
This is Outlook’s default working day, which you can change to whatever hours you work. Click File > Options > Calendar and look for the “Work Time” section. You can change your working hours here.
As an example, we’ll change our working hours to 10 am to 4 pm and then click “OK.” If we open a new Meeting request and click on the Scheduling Assistant, our working hours have changed to reflect the new hours.
Outlook will show these hours to anyone with access to your calendar when they try to book a meeting with you.
Let’s say you’re a night owl who works remotely and can set your own hours. You need to be available in the afternoon so that there’s some overlap with your early-bird colleagues, but you prefer a later start, so you change your working hours to 12 pm to 8 pm. When you create a meeting request and add a colleague, Outlook displays your working hours as 12 pm to 8 pm and any hours they don’t work in this period will show as a light gray bar.
When they try to book a meeting with you, all of the hours up to 12 pm will similarly show as a light gray bar for them.
You can also set your working days, so if you’re part-time or you work on the weekend, you can change this in File > Options > Calendar > Work Week.
We’ll change ours to show that Friday is a non-working day. When we create a new meeting request and look at the Scheduling Assistant, it shows the whole day as a light gray bar, indicating that these aren’t working hours for us.
You might need to educate your colleague as to what the gray bar means—and encourage them to put their own working days and hours in—but once everyone knows what this means, at least people will only have themselves to blame if they book a meeting with you for a time you don’t work.
