How Clockwise Categorizes Meetings

In this article:


Meeting Categories

Clockwise uses machine learning models to automatically categorize your meetings. We look at factors such as historical attendance rate, meeting size, duration, and location to choose the category. Clockwise will categorize your meetings into the below category options:

    • External: A calendar event with an external attendee invited to the event.  We will also attempt to recognize external meetings without an external attendee invited.
    • One-on-One: A meeting between you and one other internal attendee.
    • Team Sync: A recurring meeting between you and multiple other internal teammates.
    • Hold: A calendar event with no other attendees, that is not a real meeting (ex: travel time, hold for a meeting)
    • Focus Time: Blocks of free time within your working hours longer than 2 hours.  Holds for Focus Time should also be included here (eg: No Meeting Wednesday, WFH)
    • Ad-Hoc: Internal, non-recurring meetings 
    • Out of Office: A calendar event indicating you won’t be in the office (eg. OOO, PTO, Vacation)
    • Holiday: A calendar event indicating this is a holiday and attendees won't be in the office.
    • Other events: All other events not captured by the above.

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

How to edit meeting categories

Meetings have some nuances that we might not have accurately categorized.  If Clockwise has incorrectly categorized your meeting, and you'd like to correct categorization:

Meetings have some nuances that we might not have accurately categorized.  If Clockwise has incorrectly categorized your meeting, and you'd like to correct categorization:

  1. Click on the event in Clockwise.

  2. Click on the event title to expand the event details in the left side of the screen.

  3. Under "More settings" there will be an event category.  Click on the event category and choose from the drop down menu to update. This category will remain for any recurring events in the calendar series. 


How meeting categories are used

In addition to helping you navigate your calendar, meeting categories inform other features of Clockwise.

Slack Sync

This categorization methodology decides what status to show in Slack between Focus Time, in meetings, or out of the office.  It will also be able to distinguish between holds on your calendar and team meetings to intelligently set your Do Not Disturb at the right time.

Click here to learn more about Slack Sync.

Color Coding

After you've turned on your Color Coding sync, this meeting categorization ensures the right colors are attributed to the correct meetings. 

Click here to learn more about Color Coding.

    • Clockwise will recognize all events created with OOO in the title and categorize them as such. However, this will not apply to OOO events created on your personal calendar syncing to Clockwise via our personal calendar feature.
    • If a team calendar exists, it will sync it over to the team calendar so that everyone else on the team may see you are OOO for that day
    • There is no need to create another OOO event on your team calendar, this will cause duplicates.