Setting up your working times
Navigating the calendar to allow you to set your availability
Iain avatar
Written by Iain
Updated over a week ago

Our calendar function combines both your normal working times, your appointments, reserved sessions for clients, offers of rearrangements for clients and any unavailable time you may have set (e.g. for holidays or by connecting your Google calendar).

The calendar screen

When you first register your calendar will be empty. This is the calendar view you will see:

An empty calendar like this means you will not be shown in our listing as you have no working times set. When you first visit this page, the system will offer to set some of the most popular times for you or you can enter working times yourself.

Note that your working times will be anchored to the timezone that you are using when you set up your account. This is shown in the footer at the bottom of the screen. What this means is that as summer time / daylight savings is applied in that timezone the hours you work will remain the same. For example in the UK you will have the same working hour whether the clocks go forward or backward. What this will mean is that for clients who view your profile in countries where the summer time change is not at the same time as in your timezone, they'll see different slots available even though you will be working at the same time. 

Working times

Working times are time ranges during the week that you wish to make available for booking by clients. To add a new working time, click on the day you wish to add it and then choose Add working time... from the pop up menu:

You will then be asked to configure this working time in the following screen:

First you choose what type of locations you will support in this working time rage - you must select at least one. Note that you can't have overlapping working times so if you want to offer phone and skype select both of these.

Then set when your availability begins and ends. For example if you want to make yourself available all morning from 9am to 12pm on a Monday then set the times as shown above.

This will mean you have availability from 09:00 to 12:00 on a Monday. All sessions that are directly bookable by clients are in 1 hour slots. if you want to offer different session lengths (e.g. 90 minutes for EMDR) then you can do so by booking clients in for a 90 minute slot after their first session. Clients cannot book sessions that are not one hour long directly.

Note that working times should be times that you will normally be available to work on the Harley Therapy platform. If you have regular sessions with clients on other platforms then you should not mark these times as available on Harley Therapy until your relationship with them comes to an end.

Session start times

The final part of setting up a working time period is to set the session start times. 

Sessions are always in 1 hour slots (you can create custom appointments that are different lengths, but sessions that can be booked by clients are always 1 hour long). 

The default setting is to have sessions start on the hour and the last part of the working time editing screen allows you to set the start time up. For example, in the screen below we've accepted the default settings for our working time between 09:00 and 12:00 on a Monday:

This will result in you having sessions advertised for clients to book at 09:00, 10:00 and 11:00.

If you'd like to start at a different time, e.g. 30 minutes past the hour, then for the same working time you'd have sessions at: 09:30 and 10:30 advertised. This means the 30 minutes at the start and end of the working time would never be offered to clients.

To give clients maximum flexibility (at the expense of potentially filling your diary very inefficiently) you can offer more than one start time. For example, if you added both 0 and 30 minutes past the hour you'd add these to the screen as shown below:

Settings like this will advertise sessions at 09:00, 09:30, 10:00, 10:30 and 11:00. If a client books the 09:30 slot however then only the 10:30 and 11:00 slots would remain bookable by other clients.

Start times can be any number of minutes past the hour. For example setting them to 5 would offer sessions at: 09:05 and 10:05 for the working time above. 

Note it's best to ensure that the session times you are offering match the start and end times of your working time slot to ensure you don't have time that will never be offered to clients.
See video tutorial

Adding unavailable times

Unavailable times are times that you would normally be available but are not available due to other appointments, holidays or for some other temporary reason. They are specific to dates and need to be added explicitly.

You have two options to add unavailable times to your calendar:

Automatically: by connecting your Google calendar  where appointments you have marked as busy in that calendar will be shown as busy in your calendar here, e.g.:

Note that the calendar integration we use doesn't read the details of any appointment in your google calendar - it just checks the busy / free status of any period. Any appointment in your google calendar marked as busy will automatically exclude any session times that would overlap with them when offering sessions to clients.

Manually : to add an unavailable time, click on the day you'd like it to start and then select Add unavailable time... You then enter the start and end date of the unavailable time (this could be between two hours on one day or for several days):

Note that when setting times there are pre-populated times that are selectable from the drop down menu but you may type in any time without constraint.

If you have your Google Calendar connected it may not be possible to create an unavailable time for (say) a holiday that spans several days when you have already Google Calendar appointments in it. The best approach in this case is to add the holiday as a multi day appointment (marked as busy) in your google calendar.

Did this answer your question?