How to set up a booking link that protects your week: buffers, notice and daily limits

A booking link decides who gets your time, so its settings decide how much of the week is left for the work. This guide is for freelancers, consultants and recruiters who share a booking link on Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook, with calls on Google Meet or Microsoft Teams, and who have had a day eaten by back-to-back calls nobody planned. The last section says how TrackHeros booking links handle each setting.

What does each booking link setting protect?

Each setting protects a different thing, and most of them default to protecting nothing. A starting point:

Setting	What it protects	A sensible start
Hours	The parts of your day that are not for calls	The hours you want this kind of call, not all
Buffer before	Preparation, travel, the previous call running over	5–10 minutes; travel time for in-person
Buffer after	Notes, follow-up, a break	10–15 minutes after calls that create work
Minimum notice	Time to prepare, and your morning	A few hours to a day
Daily limit	The rest of the day	Two to four for calls you did not plan
Start-time spacing	Gaps you can actually use	On the hour or half hour
Booking window	The weeks you cannot see yet	Two to four weeks

None of these is a rule; the first month of bookings tells you which to move.

How much buffer time should you leave between meetings?

Ten to fifteen minutes after any call that creates work, and five to ten before any call you need to prepare for. For an in-person appointment, the buffer is the journey plus a margin, on both sides.

The two buffers do different jobs. The one after the call is for writing down what was agreed while you still remember it, sending the follow-up, and standing up. The one before is for reading last week's notes and opening the right documents. A discovery call needs both. A weekly check-in with a client you know well may need neither.

Check one thing in whatever tool you use: does a buffer keep clear of everything busy on your calendars, or only of other bookings made through the tool? A buffer that only respects the tool's own bookings will happily place a call right against a client meeting it can see. Check too whether buffers add up. If the first booking has ten minutes after it and the next link asks for ten minutes before, the gap between them may be twenty minutes or ten, depending on the tool.

How much minimum notice should a booking link require?

A few hours for routine calls with people you already work with, and a day for anything you prepare for: a discovery call, an interview, a workshop. In-person appointments need more, because plans have to change around them.

Check whether your tool counts notice on the clock or in working hours. On the clock, four hours' notice at seven in the morning lets someone book eleven o'clock before you have opened your mail, while 24 hours' notice on a Friday afternoon still lets someone take Monday at nine, which is usually fine.

Time zones make short notice worse. A visitor finishing their day can book the start of yours, and you find out when you wake up. If you work across time zones, a day of notice is the safer default.

Should you limit how many meetings people can book per day?

Yes, on any link that brings calls you did not plan: intro calls, discovery calls, candidate screenings. Two to four a day is a reasonable start; past that, the calls start to cost more than the conversation is worth.

Know what the limit counts. Often it is only the bookings made through that link. A day already full of client meetings can still take the link's full allowance in the gaps, as long as the gaps are free on the calendars the link checks. The calendars protect you from clashes; the daily limit protects you from one kind of call taking over a day that looks empty.

How often should start times be offered?

On the hour or the half hour, for most calls. Spacing equal to the appointment's length suits a block you want filled back to back.

Spacing is about the gaps left behind. Offer a 30-minute call every 15 minutes and someone books 10:15, which leaves 10:00 to 10:15 and 10:45 to 11:00: two quarter-hours too short for anything but email. Offer it on the hour and half hour and every gap is a whole half hour.

Check where your tool counts starts from. Counted from the beginning of your hours, hours that begin at 9:15 produce starts at 9:15 and 9:45, not on the hour. Begin your hours where you want the grid to begin.

How far ahead should people be able to book?

Two to four weeks for most links. Use a fixed date range for something that ends, such as a hiring round or a project phase, and leave a link open-ended only if you are sure it will still make sense in six months.

Far-future bookings are the ones that go wrong: the holiday you had not entered yet, the contract that will have ended, the client who has forgotten by the time the day arrives. A rolling window keeps the horizon the same distance away every day. Counting it in business days rather than calendar days keeps ten days meaning two working weeks, whichever day someone opens the page.

Should a booking link offer all your working hours?

No. Offer each link the hours you want that kind of call. Intro calls on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons leave the other days whole. Two ranges a day, nine to twelve and two to five, keep lunch and a focus block that no buffer would protect.

Set holidays and the odd late evening as date-specific changes to your hours rather than as calendar events, so they apply to every link using those hours, whichever calendars each link checks.

What does a sensible set-up look like?

Here are three links for one person, a freelancer who also screens candidates for a client:

Setting	Intro call, 20 min	Client working session, 60 min	Candidate screening, 30 min
Hours	Tue and Thu, 14:00–17:00	Mon–Thu, 9:00–12:00	Mon, Wed, Fri, 10:00–16:00
Buffer before	None	10 minutes	5 minutes
Buffer after	10 minutes	15 minutes	15 minutes
Minimum notice	24 hours	48 hours	24 hours
Daily limit	3	1	4
Start times	Every 30 minutes	On the hour	Every 30 minutes
Window	Rolling, 15 business days	Rolling, 4 weeks	Fixed: the hiring round

Then check the worst day. A Wednesday could hold one working session and four screenings; a Tuesday, one working session and three intro calls. Where hours overlap, as the working session and the screenings do on a Wednesday morning, the calendars stop the two clashing. The limits decide whether a full Wednesday is one you would accept; if not, lower them.

What are the common mistakes?

• Buffers longer than the gaps. Fifteen minutes either side of a 30-minute call needs an hour of free time. A calendar of 45-minute gaps then offers nothing.
• Notice longer than the window. Three days' notice on a link open for the next two days offers no times at all.
• All-day events marked busy. A "Working from home" event shown as busy blocks the whole day. Show it as free.
• Tentative events. An event marked tentative often counts as busy, so a meeting you have not committed to can still block the time.
• The wrong time zone on your hours. Nine to five in the wrong zone is still nine to five, at the wrong time.

If a page suddenly shows nothing, the causes and how to find them are in why does my booking page show no times.

How does TrackHeros handle buffers, notice and daily limits?

TrackHeros booking links check busy time on every Google and Microsoft calendar you tick for the link, across clients, and always on the calendar the appointment goes into. Events marked busy, tentative or out of office block a time; events marked free in Google, and events shown as free or working elsewhere in Outlook, do not. Only each account's main calendar is read.

Each link has its own settings:

• Buffers before and after each appointment, kept clear of anything busy on those calendars. Your other bookings count as busy with their own buffers around them, so the gaps add up.
• Minimum notice: nothing is offered closer than that to now.
• A daily limit: at most that many bookings of the link on one day.
• Start times every few minutes up to every four hours, or once per appointment length, counted from the start of each range of hours.
• How far ahead: a rolling window of calendar or business days, two fixed dates, or open-ended.
• Hours from one of your availability schedules, with weekly hours, several ranges a day and date-specific changes.

Preview, beside each link under Bookings, opens the page exactly as a visitor sees it. If a calendar the link checks cannot be read, the page offers no times and you get an alert, rather than offering times that might clash. Every setting is on the booking links page, the case for checking several clients' calendars at once is in one booking link across several client calendars, and how many links each plan keeps live is on the pricing page.