Smart Availability Calendar: Meeting Scheduling Made Easy | Motion | Motion

Are you tired of going back and forth with “does X time work for you?” emails? Not only are they a waste of time, but they can also delay calls or meetings or even lead to cancellations.

What is an availability calendar?

In the business world, an availability calendar is a calendar that shows available days and time slots you can send to prospects, stakeholders, partners, or team members to schedule meetings or calls. (Rental businesses also use availability calendars to lease rooms, houses, and vehicles.)

It can be formatted in multiple ways but often follows the typical monthly or weekly calendar format.

A physical calendar might work in a single-office small business, but issues quickly arise at a larger scale — different time zones, conflicting meeting hours, and more.

That’s why most companies have long since transitioned to digital alternatives like Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar. Digital calendars are interactive, changing in real time as people on your team add tasks or meetings and invite people.

Interactive calendars come with many benefits — adapting time zones automatically, making cross-office or WFH collaboration smoother, and improving visibility for the whole team.

When it comes to availability, they’re a good visual indicator, but you probably don’t want to share the inner workings of your team with every prospect. Google and Outlook calendars include some basic appointment scheduling tools, but they’re not great. In these calendars, you have to set times and accept requests manually.

What makes a smart availability calendar different?

A smart availability calendar uses AI or machine learning to better adapt to your needs and those of your clients. It shows availability based on existing tasks in your work calendar — even connecting to third-party software like Google Calendar.

But what sets it apart is how it distinguishes certain types of tasks — unfixed vs. important and fixed, making your calendar more flexible.

For example, Motion’s availability calendar uses an algorithm to schedule non-fixed tasks around meetings.

This can be particularly helpful if prospects and clients are in various time zones. The more flexible you can be, the faster you can jump on a call with a prospect to close a deal.

If a prospect struggles to find a time that works for them, you risk that they just move on to another competitor. Speed matters a lot in B2B sales. For example, fast responses drive more conversions — responses within the first five minutes drive 8x higher conversion rates.

Here are some of the features of a smart availability calendar that help you avoid this:

How to create the ideal availability calendar with Motion

Enough theory. Let’s examine how Motion’s availability calendar can make your life easier with smart features like automatic rescheduling.

Create a custom availability calendar/meeting booking site

Motion lets you create a dedicated booking site in just a few clicks. Potential clients, teammates, stakeholders, and others can then visit this site and book a time.

You can customize the page, including various information about the type of meeting or call available for booking. But be careful not to include too much information. A little goes a long way when it comes to getting a potential client to book a call.

Create different templates for different channels and people

Not every call should be the same length or require the same amount of pre-call information. Motion makes it easy to create different templates for various use cases.

Set your schedule and preferences beyond availability

Not an early bird? Make sure that the automated scheduler doesn’t lock in an 8 am meeting by setting a concrete schedule.

Turn on automatic back-to-back meeting scheduling

If you enable this function, Motion will automatically try to schedule meetings back-to-back to give you more time to do focused work.

Optimize your entire team’s calendars with Motion

What differentiates Motion from other availability calendar solutions is that it optimizes your team’s calendars. It doesn’t just help them book meetings effectively.

Create tasks and let Motion schedule them for you

With Motion, there’s no need to spend time trying to fit a new task into your schedule. You just need to create the task and set the priority, deadline, and dependencies, and Motion takes care of the rest.

Schedule recurring tasks

Of course, you can also schedule recurring tasks (like a daily standup meeting) into everyone’s calendar. If it’s a low-priority internal meeting, you can set the priority level to “try to finish.” Essentially, that will allow more urgent tasks to get priority over the meeting.

Get a high-level overview with project views

Motion doesn’t just help you plan your team's day-to-day tasks and schedules. Kanban boards and our project view make planning larger and more complex projects easy.

How Motion helped Sparkmate reduce distractions and ship work faster

Before finding Motion, Morgan Pelissier, Co-Founder of Sparkmate, struggled to find a work management solution for his company. After testing multiple solutions, his co-founder Max typically concluded, “No, not useful.”

Morgan came up with a rule to promote that, “I have a rule in my company. Everything you do twice, you automate.” He is a big believer in automation as a way to help small teams have the output of much larger teams.

But he was having a hard time automating task delegation, prioritization, and time management, even though they’re tasks he dealt with on a daily basis.

Motion helped Morgan automate organization and focus more on shipping his most important deliverables — making it easier for his team to ship faster and work with more direction and less stress.

Let Motion handle your meeting scheduling and optimize your calendar

Even if you’re just looking for an availability calendar, Motion delivers unique features that make it a smoother experience for everyone involved.

Motion is a unique productivity platform that can help your team work more and fuss less. To see how it can transform your team's work, sign up for our 7-day free trial today.