Flexible Holds

Do you want to save space for an afternoon cup of tea? Maybe you need to find time to take the dog out? Or to hold a break in meetings for nursing? Or to build in a morning meditation routine? Whatever the reason, Clockwise can help you protect time for any break or flexible obligation with Flexible Holds. 

Leaning into flexibility will let you get the most out of your schedule: by allowing Clockwise to assist in scheduling moves and upholding your preferences, you’ll maximize your Focus Time and decrease interruptions that bump you off-track. In order to help ease you into this flexibility, Clockwise has introduced Flexible Holds and Smart Meeting Breaks. These tools allow you to individually affect your calendar while not causing an interruption to your teammates’ schedules.

Together with protected holds, you’re ready to build a schedule you love and defend your well-automated Focus Time!

Flexible Holds

Finding time for healthy breaks and having control of what your day feels like can be important to building the perfect schedule. Whether you’re looking to make a habit of taking a daily walk to break up your day, reviewing weekly metrics, or otherwise need to prepare slides for a specific upcoming meeting, Clockwise wants to help you automate a schedule you love. Flexible Holds allow you to automate time-intensive scheduling to ensure that you strike the right balance.

Flexible Holds are events where you are the only attendee. Exactly when they happen doesn’t matter, just that they do. As your schedule changes throughout the week, Clockwise will automatically shuffle your flexible holds so your calendar reacts as your day evolves.

Routines are Flexible Holds that are recurring flexible events, like a quick coffee break or checking your email inbox –  things in your calendar that require time but do not have a specific time by which they need to be completed within your workday or workweek.

Task Holds are Flexible Holds that are one-time events with only 1 attendee, like creating slides for an upcoming meeting.

When a calendar changes and a conflict arises with a Flexible Hold, Clockwise moves the hold to a new time slot immediately within its confines – unlike Flexible Meetings that move once a day and only when there is > 24 hours before the event. 

Here are a few other considerations for your custom Flexible Hold:

• You can fill in as much detail as you like on the event and can set it to private if you want to keep the name and detail hidden.
• As an event with no other attendees, Clockwise will automatically categorize this event as a hold for you.
• When scheduling the event, make the standing recurrence the preferred time you'd like it to occur and then use the time of day flexibility to define the window within which it is ok to move. This will keep the event at your preferred time unless Clockwise finds a less disruptive time or needs to resolve a conflict. 

Creating a Flexible Hold

If you’re familiar with the Flexible Meeting feature, using Flexible Holds is set up similarly, with the main difference being that holds are events with just yourself as an invitee, and meetings involve 2+ attendees.

1. Create a new event on your calendar with the Clockwise calendar: title the event, choose a time, and state that it should be flexible.

   

2. Click Confirm to save the event.

   

When finding the event on your calendar after creation, you may see it has already found a more suitable place to create your hold on your calendar. You will also note the toggle will be marked as a Flexible Meeting when clicking into the event for more details.

Changing an event to become Flexible

1. Click on an event within the Clockwise calendar.

2. Toggle on Flexible meeting.

   
   

   

You can continue to set constraints on both days the event can flex to, as well as the time of day the event is able to occur. Once flexibility is set it auto-saves for the event and copies to all of its future recurrences if it exists.

Managing Flexible Holds

All Flexible Holds exist in your Flexibility dashboard view. This view shows all of your calendar holds as one-offs or recurring events and allows you to adjust the flexibility, create, and delete events in list-view.

Removing a Flexible Hold

To remove the flexibility of a hold so that it no longer moves, untoggle the Flexible setting from the event. Once the hold is unmarked as flexible, both that occurrence and any future occurrences will not move, but will be persistent on your calendar.

If you wish to no longer have a hold on your calendar altogether, delete the event and its future recurrences from the calendar.