How to Design Your Availability: Buffer Time, Breaks and Slot Intervals

Most solo professionals do the same thing when they move to online booking: they copy their working hours into the system and declare "9am–6pm, all available". A few weeks later one of two complaints shows up — either the day passes with no bookings, or the bookings are packed so tightly that lunch never happened and there was no time to reset the room between clients.

The problem isn't the system. It's that the availability was never designed. Availability isn't a copy of your working hours; it's a decision about how your day will go.

Availability is not the same as working hours

Not every hour you're at work is an hour you can take a booking. Setup, cleaning, paperwork, phone calls, ordering supplies, your own break — all of it is part of the job, and none of it is a bookable slot.

A practical starting point: write down your weekly working hours, then subtract the blocks that are genuinely not open to bookings. What's left is your real availability. It's usually 20–30% less than people expect, and that's normal.

Buffer time: room to breathe between appointments

Buffer time is an automatic, unbookable gap added before or after an appointment — "Buffer before" and "Buffer after" in the settings. It earns its keep in two places:

• After: resetting the room, writing notes, taking payment, seeing the client out. Ten to fifteen minutes is typical for physiotherapy and massage; five to ten for hair.
• Before: needed for services with real setup (equipment, materials). Most businesses don't need it.

Skip the buffer and you'll spend that time anyway — the calendar just won't know about it, and delay accumulates as the day goes on. A fifteen-minute slip in the morning becomes an hour by evening.

Minimum notice

"I'm free right now" and "a booking can be made right now" are different claims. The "Min. notice" setting decides how soon from now the earliest bookable slot can be.

Set it too short (say fifteen minutes) and bookings land while you're driving, mid-session, or at the shop. Set it too long (say 48 hours) and you lose the client asking "anything today?".

For most solo businesses, two to four hours is a balanced starting point. Stretch it for mobile services where you have to travel; shorten it when clients come to you.

Slot interval: 15 minutes or 30?

The slot interval decides which start times a client can see. On a 30-minute interval the times run 9:00, 9:30, 10:00; on a 15-minute one, 9:15 and 9:45 appear too.

• Narrow (15 min): packs the calendar more tightly and leaves fewer gaps. But the list of options gets long and clients hesitate.
• Wide (30 min, or the length of the service): simplifies the list and makes the day more readable. Some short gaps may go unfilled.

If your service lengths vary a lot (20 min, 45 min, 90 min), a wider interval usually works better — otherwise the calendar fragments into leftovers you can't fill.

Put your breaks in the calendar

The most common mistake is leaving breaks out entirely, on the theory that a gap will turn up on its own. It won't. The system fills every space it sees as free, because that's its job.

Put your lunch, your short daily pause, and any fixed commitments (a weekly bookkeeping hour, your own appointments) in as permanent blocks. Clients never see them; those hours simply close.

Protect your peak hours

Every business has a demand peak — Saturday afternoon for hair, weekday evenings for nutrition, early mornings for physiotherapy. Those hours are your most valuable inventory.

Two practical consequences:

1. Don't fragment peak hours with short services. Giving Saturday at 2pm to a twenty-minute job and turning away a ninety-minute booking is an expensive trade.
2. Move your own errands — paperwork, supplies, personal appointments — into the quiet hours.

How far ahead should you open the calendar?

This is the "Booking horizon" setting. Opening it indefinitely looks appealing but creates two problems: no-show rates climb for bookings made far in advance, and when your prices or terms change you're left holding appointments made under the old ones.

For most services four to eight weeks is plenty. Longer makes sense for recurring treatment or follow-up work (physiotherapy, nutrition); keep it shorter for one-off services.

Enter holidays and time off in advance

Known holidays, trips and days off belong in the calendar before they arrive. An appointment you have to cancel later costs far more than one that was never taken: the client has planned around it, and may have taken time off work.

Entering the year's known holidays in one sitting takes ten minutes and protects you for the rest of the year.

In short

A good availability calendar comes down to six decisions: which hours are genuinely bookable, buffer time, minimum notice, slot interval, fixed breaks, and how far ahead you open. Get those six right and the calendar manages itself — your days end up neither overloaded nor empty.

In Randevunu AI each of these is set separately — under Booking settings: "Buffer before", "Buffer after", "Min. notice" and "Booking horizon"; plus weekly availability, per-service duration and days off. Pick a username — you design the day, the calendar enforces it.