How to send your availability in an email (3 ways)

There are three ways to tell someone when you're free by email: type the times out by hand, paste a booking link, or send a live availability link. Hand-typed times are the most personal and still convert best with someone important, but they go stale the moment your calendar changes. A booking link never goes stale but only offers the slots you configured, and some people won't click one. A live availability link sits in between: it shows your real free time, updates itself, and lets the other person pick. Whichever you choose, always write the timezone — it is the single most common cause of a missed call.

Way 1: Type the times out

Still the right answer when you're writing to one person who matters — a client, a candidate, someone senior. It reads as effort, and it doesn't ask them to do anything.

The version that works:

Any of these work for me (all times CET):
Tue 9 Sep, 14:00–16:00
Wed 10 Sep, 10:00–12:00
Thu 11 Sep, after 15:00
Happy to work around you if none of those fit.

Three rules make this land: give ranges, not single slots (a range gives them room to counter-propose), name the timezone explicitly rather than assuming a shared one, and offer two or three options — more than that reads as indecision and invites a slow reply.

The failure mode is timing. You send three slots, they reply on Thursday, and two of them are gone — so you write another email with three more. Two rounds of that and the meeting is a week later than it needed to be.

Way 2: Paste a booking link

A booking page (Calendly, Cal.com, Microsoft Bookings and similar) hands the choice to the recipient and removes the back-and-forth entirely. For recurring, low-stakes scheduling — sales calls, office hours, intro chats — it is hard to beat.

Where it costs you:

• It shows the slots you configured, which may not reflect when you are genuinely free — especially if your real schedule lives across more than one calendar and the tool only reads one of them.
• Sending one to a client or a senior contact can read as transactional — as if their time is being routed. Plenty of people deliberately don't send them upward.
• It only works in one direction. It tells them when you are free; it can't find a time that works for both of you.

A good compromise is to do both: write two or three concrete times, then add the link underneath as the fallback for people who'd rather just pick.

Way 3: Send a live availability link

A live availability link shows the recipient your actual free and busy time on a week grid, updating as your calendar changes. They see when you are free, in their own timezone, and — if you allow it — pick a time directly. Unlike a static list of slots, it is still correct three days later.

The privacy question is the one to ask of any such tool: does the recipient see when you are busy, or what you are doing? With BusyBoard — the automated way here — they see coloured busy blocks and the gaps between them. Event titles, attendees and locations are never shown, and the link works without an account on their side.

Because the link stays valid, it works well in an email signature: “Need a time? Here's when I'm free.” Every email you already send becomes a way to be booked, with nothing extra to write.

Which to use when

• One important recipient: type the times. Add a link underneath as the escape hatch.
• Repeat, low-stakes scheduling: a booking link, every time.
• Your free time is spread across several calendars: a live availability link that merges them, or you will keep offering times you are not actually free.
• You need a time that suits both of you: neither a typed list nor a booking page solves this; you need something that can overlay two schedules.

One thing to get right

Write the timezone, always, even domestically — “2pm” between two people in the same country is still ambiguous during the weeks when daylight saving shifts on different dates. If you send times across borders often, a link that renders in the recipient's own timezone removes the arithmetic, and the mistake, entirely.