Hiding your availability using the look busy or minimize gaps settings

Use these settings to limit your available time slots and make you appear in high demand.

You can use the look busy and minimize gaps settings in Acuity to hide some of your availability from your clients. The look busy setting makes you look like you're in high demand by hiding a percentage of your available time slots each day, while minimize gaps maximizes your day by clustering your appointments together.

Tip: These settings will apply to all calendars in your account.

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Look busy

If you have a lot of availability but want to appear busier or more in-demand, hide some appointment slots with the look busy setting. When you enable Look busy, you'll still see your entire availability in the Calendar panel, but clients booking online will only see some of your time slots for each day.

You set the percentage of each day's slots that are hidden from clients. As the available slots are booked, they're hidden (and are counted as hidden). The number of slots displayed to clients will remain the same until your calendar starts to run out of slots. At that point, only the remaining open slots can be displayed.

Keep in mind that while the number of slots displayed will remain the same each day, different appointment time slots might appear on different days. For example, if you have four available appointment times and want 50% of your availability hidden, a client might see slots available at 9:00 AM and 10:00 AM one day, but 9:00 AM and 11:00 AM another day. 

As an example, here's how your availability would display on a day with 10 time slots, when 50% of availability is hidden:

To enable the look busy setting:

1. In Acuity, click Availability.
2. Click Global scheduling limits.
3. Click Look busy, then switch the Look busy toggle on.
4. Enter a percentage, then click Save changes.

Tip: The look busy setting does not apply to group classes, which you choose to offer at specific times, unless you set it to 100%. At 100%, all appointment slots and group classes will be hidden.

Minimize gaps

If you offer many different start times, enable the minimize gaps setting to avoid downtime scattered throughout your day. With this feature, you can remove all gaps, or remove only short gaps while still allowing larger gaps of 2-6 hours between groups of appointments.

When you enable minimize gaps, your clients will only see open slots that are directly before or after your existing appointments. If there are no appointments booked yet on a given day, the system will show all time slots until the first appointment is booked.

To enable minimize gaps:

1. In Acuity, click Availability.
2. Click Global scheduling limits.
3. Click Minimize gaps, then switch the Minimize gaps toggle on.
4. Select Avoid any gaps between appointments during the day to minimize any gaps during the day. If you don't mind larger gaps in your day, select Avoid small gaps, but allow gaps of at least, then set a minimum gap size.

Keep in mind:

• Minimize gaps will not work as expected if you have multiple calendars and the pool availability is turned on.
• If you have two or more calendars that offer the same appointment type, an Any available option will appear on your scheduler. When a client selects this option, they’ll see all available appointments on all calendars, in which case the minimize gaps setting won't work as expected. 
• If multiple appointments can happen at the same time, we won't fill every opening in one slot before opening the preceding and following slots.
• If you have sections of availability, such as ‌a few hours in the morning and a few in the afternoon, the Avoid any gaps between appointments during the day setting will not work independently in each section of availability in a given day. So, if your availability is listed as 8am-12pm, 2pm-5pm and a 60-minute appointment is booked at 3pm, only the times immediately before and after the appointment will show — the morning availability will not show.
• If you ‌enable events from your third-party calendar to sync to Acuity, the Minimize gaps setting will not work as expected. This is because this feature doesn't recognize events that sync from an external calendar as appointments.
   
• Minimize gaps will not work if your availability is listed as specific start times for appointments that end before the next start time. So, if your availability is listed as 9am, 10am, 11am, and a 30-minute appointment is booked at 9am, the 10am and 11am time slots will still be available to book on the scheduling page.
• Clients who reschedule appointments for the same day may be able to select times before or after their existing appointment, leaving gaps in your day. This is because their original appointment time remains scheduled until they finish updating the appointment time.  

Using both look busy and minimize gaps

You can use both look busy and minimize gaps in Acuity. On completely open days, look busy will show site visitors only a percentage of available slots. Once at least one appointment is booked, minimize gaps will take over and show only spots next to existing appointments.