How to Block Time Off So Clients Don't Book You While You're Away

Here's a scenario that happens more than anyone likes to admit: you go away for a week, forget to touch your booking settings, and come back to two people who booked appointments while you were gone and are now, understandably, annoyed. The calendar didn't know you were on a beach. It just showed the times you normally work.

Fixing that takes about a minute, and it's worth doing before every trip, every long weekend, every half-day you're taking for a dentist appointment.

Two kinds of time off

There's a difference between "I'm gone the whole day" and "I'm gone from 9 to noon." Trying to force one into the other is how people end up blocking an entire day for a half-day errand, or under-blocking and still getting booked during the hours they meant to protect.

So there are two options when you add time off: Full, which blocks the entire day (or range of days), and Partial, which blocks only a window you specify — say, 9am to noon — while leaving the rest of the day bookable as normal.

Setting up a full day (or a whole week)

Pick a start date. If it's just one day off, leave the end date blank — it defaults to a single day. If you're taking a longer trip, add an end date and everything in between gets blocked too, no need to add each day one at a time.

You can also add a short note — "Vacation," "Conference," whatever helps you remember later why that week is blocked. It's optional, and it's just for you; clients never see it, they just see that the day isn't available.

Setting up a partial block

Switch to Partial instead of Full, and two more fields show up: a start time and an end time for the block. Set it to 9:00–12:00 for a morning appointment, or 13:00–17:00 if you're heading out early for the rest of the afternoon. Everything outside that window on that day stays open exactly like normal.

Where to check it actually took

Once you save it, you'll see it listed with your upcoming time off. Only a handful of the soonest ones show up there by default — if you've got a lot stacked up, there's a dedicated page that lists everything, including time off that's already passed, in case you need to double check something after the fact.

The one thing worth double-checking

Time off only protects the days you've actually entered. It's easy to block next week's vacation and forget that the half-day you're taking for a doctor's appointment three days from now needs its own entry too — they don't relate to each other, and each one has to be added on its own. If you know a stretch of irregular days is coming up, it's worth taking two minutes to add all of them at once rather than remembering as you go.