How to Set Working Hours Per Day for Online Bookings
Working hours are rarely the same every day. Monday is admin, Wednesday afternoon is school pickup, Saturday is a half day. A booking page that shows nine to six, seven days a week, will book you into the gaps you meant to keep. Viralyze builds your availability from your Google Calendar plus the days off, partial days and buffers you set, so each day can look different.
How are working hours decided on a booking page?
By subtraction. Your connected Google Calendar supplies the busy events, your days-off settings remove whole or partial days, and buffers remove the minutes around each session. What is left is what customers can book.
This is more flexible than a weekly grid because anything you put in your calendar automatically shapes availability. A dentist appointment on Thursday at 11 removes that hour without any setting being changed.
How do I set up different hours per day?
Use partial days off for the recurring shape of your week and calendar events for the one-off changes. In the Viralyze app:
1. Open Bookings and connect Google Calendar. Choose which calendars block slots. 2. Add days off for the days you never work. For many creators that is Sunday. 3. Add partial days off for half days: "Saturday after 2 PM" or "Wednesday before 11 AM". 4. Add a date range for holidays, for example the full week of Diwali. 5. Set buffers before and after sessions, such as 10 minutes, so back-to-back bookings leave room. 6. Save and open your shre.pro link to check that each day shows what you intend.
If your week changes, come back and adjust the partial days; nothing else needs to move.
How do I keep a lunch break free every day?
Put a recurring event in a blocking calendar. A "Lunch" event from 1 to 2 PM, repeating on weekdays, removes that hour from the booking page every day without any further setting.
The same trick works for anything regular: a 4 PM school run, a 6 AM gym slot, a Friday team call. Because the sync is two-way, you manage these in Google Calendar where you already live, and the page follows.
A worked example: a voice coach's week
Arjun teaches singing online in 45-minute sessions. His real week:
- Monday: no sessions, admin only
- Tuesday to Friday: 10 AM to 1 PM and 3 PM to 7 PM
- Saturday: 10 AM to 1 PM only
- Sunday: off
His settings in Viralyze: Monday and Sunday as days off, Saturday as a partial day "after 1 PM" off, and a recurring "Lunch" event from 1 to 3 PM Tuesday to Friday in his blocking calendar. He adds a 15-minute buffer after each session for notes. A student commenting "SING" on his reel gets his booking link by DM and sees only those windows, minus any slots already taken.
What about a holiday or a sick day?
Add a date range or a single day off and leave the booking page live. Customers see the days as unavailable and book around them; you do not lose the bookings that would have come in for the following week.
For an unexpected day off, a single all-day busy event in Google Calendar does the same job from your phone in ten seconds. If you need to move existing bookings, the client can reschedule from their confirmation page, or you can move the event in Google Calendar and the booking follows.
Frequently asked questions
**Can I set different hours for different services?** Hours apply to your availability as a whole; if one service should only run in the evenings, create a separate booking arrangement or keep its slots open by leaving evenings free of other bookings.
**Do buffers apply to the first and last slot of the day?** Buffers sit around each session, so a session cannot start until the buffer after the previous one ends, and the last slot of the day must fit the session plus its buffer.
**What if I have no Google Calendar events at all?** Days off, partial days and buffers still work; the page offers the remaining time on your working days, and new bookings are added to the calendar you chose.
Start your 7-day free trial of Viralyze, no card needed, and shape your booking page around your real week.