“When are you free?”, asked forty times a year
4-minute read
“When are you free?” — then four emails, two of which cross in the post, and a time that was open when you suggested it and isn’t by the time they reply.
The industry’s answer to this is the booking link, and it works. It also means handing a company a permanent connection to your calendar, and letting a stranger write into your week without asking. Plenty of people quietly decide the back-and-forth is the lesser evil, and go on spending twenty minutes a week on it.
Step one: make your free/busy true
Before any of this is worth automating, one calendar has to know the whole truth. If your work commitments live in a calendar your personal device treats as optional, every availability answer you give is a guess. Mirror the calendars you don’t control into one you do — busy-only is enough — and the free time you see is actually free.
That alone kills most of the back-and-forth, because the majority of rescheduling is not a negotiation. It is you having offered a time that was already taken in a calendar you weren’t looking at.
Step two: send three times, without a tool
Calendar Mirror’s Send times puts your next three free times on the clipboard, ready to paste into a message. No link, no service, no page — just three times that are true because they were worked out on your device against the calendar you just made honest.
Step three, if you’re asked often enough: a request page
If “when are you free” arrives weekly rather than yearly, there is a subscription you can turn on from inside Calendar Mirror: AskWhen.me. It is deliberately not a booking link.
- Your device works out a handful of times it is willing to be asked about, and publishes only those to a page at askwhen.me/yourpage.
- Someone picks one, says who they are, and confirms by email. That is a request, not a reservation.
- The request comes back to your device, which re-checks your calendar before anything is written. Nothing lands until you accept.
- The server never sees your calendar — not the titles, not the locations, not the attendees, not the shape of your week beyond the times you chose to offer. The design is a dead drop: times in, requests out.
There is also a link you send to one person: it opens once, for a week, for them — so a forwarded message isn’t an open door — and because you sent it yourself, a still-free time can be answered without a round trip.
What this doesn’t fix
If what you want is a form that books itself into your calendar with no confirmation from you, this is the wrong product, and that will not change — it is the one design decision the whole thing is built around. The comparison pages name the tools that do it properly, including the free one. What you get here instead is a week where nothing appears that you did not personally agree to.