Novacal is built to give you granular control over your time. Currently, users can manage their time through Standard Availability, which sets your recurring weekly rhythms on an event-by-event basis, and Custom Availability, which allows you to adjust your hours for them.
While these tools are perfect for fine-tuning your daily workflow, they can become a bottleneck when you need to step away from your desk entirely. If you have five different event types, manually overriding each one for a vacation or a long weekend is a repetitive, time-consuming process that leaves room for error. You shouldn't have to edit every single booking link just to take a day off.
This is where the Novacal Out of Office (OOO) feature comes in. Instead of managing overrides separately, the OOO feature acts as a global command, allowing you to pause all bookings across your entire account in one single action.
In this guide, we’ll show you how to set up OOO in seconds so you can disconnect without the fear of a double-booking disaster.
How to Activate OOO on Novacal
- Log In to Your Account: Head over to Novacal and log in. If you don't have an account yet, you can create one in under a minute to start automating your boundaries.
- Navigate to Out of Office: From your dashboard, locate the sidebar menu on the left. Open the dropdown menu and select Out of Office. This takes you directly to your global absence settings.
- Create Your OOO Period: Click the button to Create New Out of Office and choose the specific day or the range of days you will be unavailable.
- Save: Once you hit save, Novacal automatically updates all your active booking links. Your clients will see those dates as unavailable, and you won't have to worry about any surprise notifications.
Understanding the Three Layers of Novacal Availability
To maintain a professional workflow, it helps to understand how these three features work in tandem to protect your calendar and ensure you're using the right tool for the job:
Feature | Scope | Best Use Case |
|---|---|---|
Standard Availability | Recurring | Defining your regular weekly hours. You can maintain one or more of these to use across different event types. |
Custom Availability | Availability-Specific | Specific adjustments for a single availability on a selected date |
Out of Office | Account-Wide | A master "Global Block" that stops all bookings across every event type for vacations or holidays. |
Conclusion: Professional Time Management with Novacal
Maintaining a professional presence requires more than just being available; it requires the clear communication of when you are not. By utilizing the Out of Office feature, you ensure that your clients experience a streamlined booking process while you protect your personal time from accidental interruptions.
This global setting is one of the many ways Novacal simplifies complex scheduling, allowing you to focus on your work—or your time away from it—with total confidence. Setting your boundaries takes only a moment, but the clarity it provides for both you and your invitees is invaluable.