Back in 2019, Google made the “Working Hours” feature in Calendar much more prominent to aid Digital Wellbeing efforts. Google Calendar is now adding support for split working hours, as well as creating repeat out of office (OOO) entries.
As many people have experienced changes to their working environments in the past year, their work schedules have also changed—and are now often mixed with personal commitments and other obligations. We hope that with the addition of repeating out of office entries and segmentable working hours, you can better organize your time and communicate availability to your colleagues.
The Working Hours page now features a “plus” sign to add a same-day time duration. Multiple can be added with the ability to quickly delete or “Copy time to all” days. This schedule appears when someone in your organization schedules a meeting with you. Split working hours in Google Calendar are rolling out starting today and will only be controllable on the web.
Meanwhile, the ability to repeat out of office entries expands the feature from just logging vacation schedules to “indicat[ing] time when you need to handle personal commitments.”
They can also be used to better communicate part-time availability or certain days when you’re consistently unavailable.
Repeating OOO entries are available on Android and the web starting next month, with Google noting a particular behavior when setting settings to always decline:
If you create a repeating out of office entry and select “Automatically decline meetings,” a decline meeting notification will be sent to the organizers of any meetings scheduled during your repeating OOO. If the declined meeting is a recurring meeting, those organizers may get multiple notifications—these emails are bundled for Gmail users, but not always for users of other email services.
Both of these Google Calendar features are available to all enterprise Workspace customers.
Author: Abner Li
Source: 9TO5Google
