When Are You Free
Find a time that works for everyone.
Free to use · No sign-up needed
Your two links appear here once the board is made: one for everybody, and one for you.
Six people, one question, and forty messages
Finding a time by group chat has a known shape. Somebody proposes Tuesday. Two people say yes, one says they are out on Tuesday, one replies about something else entirely, and the two who have not read it yet are the two whose diaries actually matter. Three days later somebody proposes Tuesday again.
This is that conversation flattened into one page. You pick the days worth considering, everybody ticks what suits them, and the board says which slot the most people can make and exactly who is missing from it. That last half is the useful half: “four of six” tells you nothing you can act on, and “four of six, and the two who cannot are Jo and Sam” tells you who to ask.
How to run one
- Say what you are arranging. “Team retro” is plenty; it is the heading everybody sees.
- Add the days. Start from a date and add a run of them, or add them one at a time, and take off the ones nobody wants by pressing the day.
- Choose whole days, or morning, afternoon and evening. Pick whole days if the day is the hard part.
- Send the sharing link to the group and keep the other one. Yours is how you close the board afterwards.
- Mark your own availability first. An empty board is the hardest one to be first on.
- When enough people have answered, close the board and send the time round. Closing stops new answers and leaves everything readable.
Three things worth knowing before you send the link
Nothing is converted for anybody. The board shows one set of words and every person reads them where they are. That is fine for a team in one place and a trap for a team in three, so say which zone you all mean in the message you send the link in. There is a line to that effect on the board itself, above the grid, because that is where somebody is standing when it matters.
The grid works without a mouse. One Tab gets you into it and one gets you out; inside, the arrow keys move a cell at a time, Home and End go to the ends of a row, and space ticks. Each day has an all-day button and there is a mark-everything button above, which between them turn “any evening that week” into two presses. The drag-a-rectangle trick other tools use is fast and is available to nobody who is not holding a mouse, so it is not here.
Saying you can make none of them is an answer. Put your name in, leave the grid empty, and save. You will show up on the board as somebody who has answered and cannot make any of these days, which is exactly the thing an organiser needs to know before they pick one — and it is very different from not having answered at all.
Good uses
- A retro, a one-to-one, or any meeting where four diaries have to agree and none of them are shared.
- Five-a-side, a book club, a band practice — the recurring thing that quietly stops happening because nobody wants to run the thread.
- A family deciding which weekend, where half of them will not install anything.
- Interviews or office hours: post the days, let people say which halves they can do.
When to use something else
A board finds the overlap; it does not choose between things that are not times. To pick between options somebody has already written down, that is Live Poll, and it counts votes rather than intersections. If what you want is everybody’s ideas rather than everybody’s diaries, that is Idea Cloud. And once the time is settled, put it in a calendar invite — this page is a way of agreeing, not a way of remembering.
Questions people ask
- Does anyone need an account?
- No. You pick the days, you send the link, people mark what suits them. Nobody has to sign up, nobody has to give an email address, and nobody installs anything. The organiser can sign in if they want to keep it past ninety days and find it again without the link — that is the only thing an account does here, it is optional, and it changes nothing for anybody else. The link works in whatever browser is already open, on a phone as well as a laptop.
- Does it handle time zones?
- No, and that is a decision rather than a gap. Everybody sees the same words — “Tuesday, morning” — and reads them in their own local terms. Nothing is converted for anybody. Doing it properly would mean knowing where each person really is, which a browser only guesses at and guesses wrong for anyone travelling, and it would mean turning “morning” into a clock time somebody has to commit to. A tool that quietly showed three colleagues three different grids and told them they agreed would put them in three different meetings. So if your group is spread out, agree on one zone first — “all times UK” at the top of the message you send the link in — and mark the board against that.
- Can I change my answer?
- Yes, and this is the normal way to use it rather than a recovery from a mistake. One answer per browser: open the same link again and the grid comes back the way you left it, with the button now saying Update. Change what you like and save. You never appear on the board twice. The one place that rule is inconvenient is a shared machine — two people using the same browser share one answer — so on a laptop in a kitchen, tell people to use their own phone.
- How fine can the slots be?
- Whole days, or each day split into morning, afternoon and evening. That is deliberately the whole range. A fifteen-minute grid looks more precise and is mostly a way of asking twelve people to click ninety-six boxes, and the answer it produces — “2:15 to 2:30 on Thursday” — is rarely the answer anybody wanted. If you genuinely need the exact hour, use this to settle the day and the half of it, then agree the time in one message.
- Can somebody take my answer off the board?
- Not one answer at a time, and that is worth knowing before you open a board to a room. Anyone with the link can report the board, and a report takes the whole thing off the air immediately — before anybody here has looked at it. Your manage link is what puts it back. Individual answers are not reportable, because the only thing anybody writes on a board is their own name beside a row of ticks, and a board with one answer quietly missing from it is worse than a board that is plainly gone: it would be confidently wrong about who is free.
- What happens to the board afterwards?
- It stays readable for ninety days after the last answer, then it is deleted along with every answer on it and both links stop working. Every answer pushes that date out again, so a board people are still filling in does not go anywhere. There is no archive and no way to bring one back once it has gone — so once you have picked a time, put it in a calendar invite rather than relying on this page to still be there. If you sign in from your manage link, the board stops expiring, though a calendar invite is still the better place for the answer.