Blocking out long-term time off

Using repeating personal appointments for vacations / holidays; parental leave; sabbaticals; leaves of absence; and more

Matt Tucker avatar
Written by Matt Tucker
Updated over a week ago

Schedulista is designed to support a regular weekly work schedule, but you are able to adjust your availability by blocking time out of your schedule with personal appointments. You can manage your availability through the web dashboard, as well as the Schedulista mobile app.

Uses for blocking long-term time off

  • Vacations/holidays

  • Extended travel

  • Maternity or paternity leave

  • Sabbaticals

  • Extended leaves of absence

  • Businesses just starting online scheduling can block out time before beginning offering services

Contents:

After your work hours are set, you can block off time on your schedule to take time off that is longer than a single or few days by setting repeating personal appointments through the mobile app. This allows you to set something once without having to go to each individual day or week to take time off.

You can also block out long-term time off through the mobile app.

Blocking out long-term time off

(1) Go to your Calendar

(2) In the Week or Day view, click on a time slot at the start of the first day of your needed time off. This brings up the New Appointment dialog box.

As an example, we'll select 9:00 am on December 24th as the start

(3) For the Service field, leave Personal selected

(4) Select the Duration from the drop-down menu 

For the example, we'll choose 8 hours to cover the full work day.

(5) Choose the type from the Repeats field: 

  • Daily - Repeats every day, every other day, every third day, etc.

  • Weekly - Repeats every week, every other week, every third week, etc., on days of the week selected

  • Monthly - Repeats every month, every other month, every third month, etc., on the same date (3rd of the month) or the same day of the month (2nd Thursday of the month)

  • Yearly - Repeats every year, every other year, every third year, etc.

For the example, select Weekly

     (a) For the Repeat every field, leave 1 week selected

     (b) For Repeat on, check the boxes for each of the days of the work week:                         Monday (M), Tuesday (T), Wednesday (W), Thursday (T), Friday (F)

(6) For the Ends section, select an option:

  • Never - Appointment will repeat indefinitely

  • After [X] occurrences - Appointments end after a set number

  • On - Appointment end on a specified date

For the example, select the On option and click on the white field to select an end date from the calendar that appears

(7) (optional) Enter a title for the breaks in the Appointment Notes text field (ex. Vacation or Holiday)

(8) Click Save

Making changes to long-term time off

Once a repeating series is set, you can reschedule or remove individual personal appointments or the whole series. Click on the appointment on your calendar to make a change.

When you make the change, you'll be prompted if you want to apply it only to that personal appointment or that and all future appointments in the repeating series.

What you'll see on your calendar

On your calendar, you'll see the red personal appointment blocks appearing each day you work to make you unavailable during that time on your schedule.

Clients will not see your time off appointments in the scheduler, just that there is no appointment time available during that period.

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