There are four ways to put something on the calendar, and the differences are mostly about speed.
Click an empty slot. The form opens with that time filled in and a default half-hour block.
Drag across empty slots. The same thing, except the length is what you dragged. This is the fastest path and the one most people never find.
Press N. Opens the form on the day you are currently looking at.
Ask the assistant. "Book thirty minutes with Sara on Thursday afternoon." It shows you the event and waits for you to confirm.
Existing events can be dragged to move them and dragged by the edge to resize them. Esc mid-drag cancels without writing anything, which is worth knowing the first time you grab the wrong block.
What kind of thing is it
Five types, and the choice changes what the form asks for next.
| Type | For |
|---|---|
| Event | Anything with a time |
| Meeting | People and a link |
| In-Person | People and a place |
| Task | Work with a deadline |
| Focus | Time you are protecting |
Focus is the underused one. A blocked afternoon is visible to every colleague looking for a slot, and time that is not on the calendar is time somebody else is entitled to book. The people who complain most about having no time to work are almost always the people whose working time is invisible.
The form
Title, and why it matters more than it looks
The title is not only a label. The meeting type is suggested from it, which affects how the meeting is analysed afterwards if it is recorded.
"Discovery call with Meridian" gets treated as a discovery call and scored against what discovery is supposed to achieve. "Chat" gets treated as nothing in particular and produces a generic summary.
The suggestion is a suggestion. You can change it or clear it, and it only ever fills in when you have not chosen one yourself.
When
Date, start time, and a duration rather than an end time. The options are 15, 30, 45, 60 and 90 minutes, and the form shows the resulting end time as you change it so you are never doing arithmetic.
All day is a toggle, and switching it on drops the times entirely.
Where, or how
Online offers four choices: nothing, a huddle, Google Meet, or Teams.
A huddle is NearSync's own meeting and it is internal only. If there is anybody from outside your organisation on the invitation, choose Meet or Teams. The platform will not pretend a huddle can host an external guest, which is better than discovering it at the start of the call.
In-person events take a location and optional directions, plus travel minutes which can be blocked out on your calendar as their own slot. That last part is what stops a two o'clock across town from becoming a ten-to-two panic.
Who
Attendees are added by search, across both colleagues and contacts.
As you add people, their availability for the chosen window appears beside them: whether they are busy, and their current presence. You see the clash before you send rather than after somebody declines.
You are shown that a person is busy. You are not shown what they are busy with. That boundary applies in both directions and it is what makes free-busy information something people are willing to share at all.
Description, and the draft button
A description field, with an option to have the assistant draft one from the title and the attendees. It fills the box, you edit it, and nothing is sent until you save.
Attachments come from Google Drive or OneDrive, whichever your organisation has connected, chosen through the provider's own picker. If both are connected, you choose which one to browse.
Meeting type
Where your organisation uses Meeting Intelligence, a meeting type can be bound here, and one is suggested from the title.
The type decides which framework the analysis applies afterwards and which outcomes get measured. Setting it at creation is worth the two seconds: it is the difference between a generic write-up and one scored against what that kind of meeting is meant to achieve.
If nothing in the list fits, leave it blank. A generic summary is a perfectly good outcome; a discovery call analysed as a standup is not.
Repeat
Six options: does not repeat, daily, every weekday, weekly, monthly, yearly.
Weekly repeats on whichever weekday you started on. Every weekday means Monday to Friday.
Repeats end in one of three ways: never, on a date, or after a number of occurrences.
Choose deliberately. A never-ending weekly meeting outlives the reason it was created roughly every time, and cleaning up somebody else's dead recurring meeting is nobody's job, which is why nobody does it.
Editing and deleting a repeat
Change one occurrence of a series and you are asked what you meant.
This event. One occurrence only.
This and following. From here forward. The past stays as it actually happened.
All events. The whole series, backwards and forwards.
Deleting asks the same three questions.
"This and following" is almost always the right answer for a change in reality. The meeting moved to Thursdays from now on, and last month genuinely was on Tuesdays. "All events" rewrites history, which makes past records wrong and eventually makes somebody's analysis wrong too.
Recording it
Any calendar event can have Pippin Scribe sent to it from the detail panel. It joins the call as a visible participant, records, and produces a summary afterwards.
Recording draws on your organisation's included meeting hours rather than on your credits.
After it is created
The event appears immediately, tinted by its source.
If it went to a connected external calendar, it also appears there on that provider's own sync schedule rather than instantly, which is worth knowing before you refresh Google three times.
Attendees receive an invitation and can respond. Their responses show on the event, and yours shows to them.
Three things worth doing every time
Write a title somebody else could understand. It is what the analysis reads, what attendees see in a crowded week, and what you will be searching for in four months.
Add the attendees before choosing the time, so the availability appears while you still have the option of changing it.
End the repeat. Six months, a quarter, twelve occurrences. Almost anything is better than never.
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