Juggling your calendar can get tiring when your days are occupied with calls and meetings. Email exchanges confirming and rescheduling appointments clog up your inbox and increase the chance of no shows.

Scheduling platforms like Calendly offers a solution to this problem if you’re looking to automate your scheduling. Depending on your needs, Calendly offers both a free plan and a number of paid plans. Each new user is given a 14-day free trial to try out all the paid features before being moved to the more limited free plan. In this article, I’ll show you how to make the most of Calendly’s free features.

Pro tip: if you want unlimited links and calendar connections without ever having to pay, check out zcal which is like Calendly only free.

How to create a Calendly account

In order to use Calendly and create your first meeting invite link, you will need to create an account if you don’t already have one.

1. From the home page, you can either click on ‘Get started’ (at the top right) or Enter your email near the ‘Sign-up’ button as shown below.

   

2. Sign-up using your Google account or with a password.

   

3. Enter your preferred username to create a personalized URL and choose your ‘Time zone’. Click on ‘Continue’ to go to next step.

   

4. Add your typical weekly availability. This default availability will be used as a starting point for new links but you can edit it as needed.

   

5. Choose the role that best describes you and hit ‘Finish’.

   

6. Voila! 🎉 Your account has been created. Calendly provides you with a default 30 minute meeting link.

   

How to create a one-on-one Calendly meeting link

1. When you create a Calendly account, you get a 30 minute link by default. You can either choose to edit it or delete it and create a new one from scratch.

   a. Edit an existing invite link :

   

   b. Create a new meeting event:

   You can create a new event by either clicking on the blue ‘Create’ button (top right) or ‘New Event Type’ button right below it.

   

2. Click on the ‘Create’ button in front of the One-on-One option.

   

3. Add the basic details on this first page such as the event name, location (you can choose video integration options such as google meet, zoom, etc), description, and so on. Click on ‘Next’ to go to the next step.

   

4. In this section, you will add information about your meeting availability.

   a. Fill in the first 2 fields that include the date range (until how long you want to show the schedule) and duration of the event.

   

   b. Right below the duration field, you will see the option to add your preferred time slots. You can either choose to use the ‘existing schedule’ which is your default availability or add your custom hours. If you select the ‘custom hours’ option, you can then edit the time intervals for each day of the week and/or add multiple intervals within a day by clicking the ‘+’ sign.

   

   c. Buffer can be added before and/or after the event to give you time for preparation.

   

5. There are some additional rules settings for availability that you can add such as time slot increments (frequency of slots), minimum notice required by the invitee to book a slot, maximum events per day etc.

   

6. Customize your invite further by adding questions, event reminders, adding payment links etc. Most of these features are not included in the ‘Free forever’ plan but can be tested during the 14 day free trial.

   

7. Once the setup is done, click on ‘Save & close’, and your invite link will be ready to be used. To get your link, go back to your dashboard and you will see the option to directly ‘copy’ the link or click on ‘Share’ for more options such as embed to a website or copy time slots to send in an email.