Make Me Look Busy and Minimize Gaps in Scheduling are settings that hide some of your availability from your clients. Make Me Look Busy will make you look like you're in high demand, while Minimize Gaps is designed to maximize your day by clustering your appointments together.
These are account-wide settings, meaning they will apply to all calendars in your account.
Note: If you use both Make Me Look Busy and Minimize Gaps in Scheduling, on completely open days, Make Me Look Busy will be used to show 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.
Make Me Look Busy ⚓
This feature is great if you have a lot of availability but want to appear a bit more booked up or busy to your clients.
You will still see your entire availability on the admin side of Acuity. Clients scheduling through Acuity will only see some of your total time slots.
You choose the percentage of slots Acuity will hide. Acuity will show the rest to your clients.
As slots are booked, they are hidden (and are counted as hidden). So the number of slots displayed to clients will remain the same until Acuity starts to run out of slots. At that point, only the remaining open slots can be displayed.
As an example, here is how Acuity displays availability on a day with 10 time slots, when 50 percent of availability is hidden:
| Appointments Booked | Slots Still Available on the Admin End | Slots Shown to Clients |
| 0 | 10 | 5 |
| 1 | 9 | 5 |
| 2 | 8 | 5 |
| 3 | 7 | 5 |
| 4 | 6 | 5 |
| 5 | 5 | 5 |
| 6 | 4 | 4 |
| 7 | 3 | 3 |
| 8 | 2 | 2 |
| 9 | 1 | 1 |
To enable Make Me Look Busy:
- Go to Business Settings > Availability.
- Click on Edit Default Scheduling Limits.
- Click on Look Busy.
- Use the slider to turn on Look Busy and enter a percentage.
- Click Save Limits.
Note: Make Me Look Busy does not apply to group classes, which you choose to offer at specific times.
Minimizing Gaps in Scheduling ⚓
If you are offering many different start times and want to avoid having bursts of downtime scattered through your day, this feature can help.
Minimize Gaps will show your clients only open slots that are before or after your existing appointments.
You can eliminate all gaps with this feature, or eliminate small gaps, but allow larger gaps of 2-6 hours between groups of 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. Once an appointment is booked, Acuity will switch to showing only specific slots in order to minimize gaps.
If your account is set up to allow multiple appointments at the same time, we won't fill every opening in one slot before opening a new slot — all slots that will disallow gaps will appear.
If you have your availability listed in sections, or have blocked time in the day, the Avoid Any Gaps 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.
To enable Minimize Gaps:
- Go to Business Settings > Availability.
- Click on Edit Default Limits.
- Click Minimize Gaps.
- Use the slider to turn on Minimize Gaps.
- Either select Avoid any gaps between appointments during the day or select Avoid small gaps, but allow gaps of at least and choose a minimum gap size.
Note: Minimize Gaps will not work as expected if you have multiple calendars and Pool Availability is turned on.