Blocking Calendar Slots and Meeting Free Day - How-tos

Objective

We highly encourage you to reserve slots on your calendar and have Thursday as a meeting-free day. This is focused on reducing the context-switching of the day-to-day activities and allows you to focus on critical items. Please note we trust each Rocketeer's common sense in making the best use of the guidelines presented here.

General Guidelines

1. Blocking Your Calendar

1.1 Out-of-Office

In case you are setting slots of time on your calendar for unavailable periods (e.g. take kids to school, doctor appointments, etc) create an event for the given period using the Out of Office type of event.

1.2 Focused Individual Work

In case you are setting slots of time on your calendar for focused individual work, place an event calendar entry on your agenda starting with the title Reserved or Blocked and set its duration.

Blocked periods should never be used by others unless it's an emergency and no other slot is possible for the situation. When it happens it's important to talk to the person and ask permission to use the blocked slot.

Reserved periods can be used for meetings then no other available time is possible to be used, it indicates non-preferable periods for meetings to concentrate them in other moments but can be used for non-recurrent meetings if necessary (e.g. recruiting meetings, training sessions, etc).

2. Meeting-Free Thursdays

For meeting-free Thursdays set a public Out of Office calendar entry for a full day starting on any given Thursday.

You can set it to automatically decline meetings and the automatic message Auto-Declined. Thursdays are Meeting-Free Days. See handbook for more details: https://go.rocket.chat/i/meeting-free-thursdays