How does Clockwise work with Holidays using Microsoft Outlook?



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In this article:



Clockwise automatically recognizes holidays to make it easier to update your calendar availability for expected holidays throughout the year. 

With holiday support:

    • Through intelligent keyword matching, Clockwise will automatically mark relevant events as Holidays when you add the name of the event in the title. 

Note: The holiday keyword list can be found in this article. It is possible for us to add additional keywords to accommodate your paid organization.

    • If your company-wide holiday doesn’t match our keywords you can create an event and easily categorize it as a “Holiday”. 
      • This can be used to indicate company-wide holidays or team-specific holidays like a Mental Health Day.
    • When attendees are added to a holiday event, Clockwise will automatically update all the involved calendars.
      • Clockwise-managed holds like Focus Time or lunch will not be created and meetings that are on Autopilot will not be updated.
      • If there are certain members of the company who don't observe the holiday - like teammates in different countries - all they have to do is decline the event to avoid an automatic holiday event from being set.

Holiday events allow Clockwise to sync your status to Slack to let your team know you will be out of the office.

If you RSVP as No to an event or delete it from your calendar you will not be marked as OOO for that event and Clockwise will work as expected. Clockwise-managed holds such as Focus Time and Lunch will be created.

Note: If you already have an OOO event on your calendar before a holiday event was created, Clockwise will respect the OOO event that was created first. Your event category will be Out of Office/Unavailable instead of Holiday on your calendar and Slack status if you're using Clockwise Slack Sync. 

How to create a holiday event in Clockwise

  1. Add an event in Outlook, title it with the name of the holiday, and set the date(s) it occurs.

Note: Be sure to set this event as 'busy' for Clockwise to be able to recognize your unavailability.

  1. Invite required attendees to add teammates, a team, or group email here as well.

  2. Click Save. Clockwise will automatically categorize the event as a Holiday for all invitees.If for any reason, Clockwise does not recognize the event title, you can simply click on the category label within Prism of the event to manually set the event to Holiday.


With the Holiday event category, you and your team will be able to easily create your own company holidays or set your country’s observed holidays! 

How to avoid an automatic holiday event set by Clockwise

You may want to opt out of a company-wide event if you work on holidays or your company is distributed globally, so you don't observe all company-defined holidays. To avoid a holiday automatically being set on your calendar, all you have to do is decline the holiday invitation. 

Once you decline the event invitation, Clockwise will create Clockwise-managed holds as expected on your calendar. 

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