How to Easily Schedule Your Sessions with Calendly!

Welcome to Post 2 in our ‘Start the Therapy Year Off Right' Series! Scheduling your initial session with Calendly is an amazing way to get started easier with your occupational therapy sessions for distance learning. Using a scheduling website such as Calendly gives parents the ability to pick a time that works for them and reduces the back and forth scheduling questions. There will be some manual adjustments later, but this definitely starts off on the right foot.

Calendly gives you one meeting type for free. After that is only $10/month for more types. But a great HACK is Calendly initially gives you Free unlimited event types! Need to divide your schedule into different schools on different days? Need to offer different session lengths? You can do that on Calendly!

Step by Step Instructions for Getting Started

Sign up at Calendly.com

If you use Gmail this step is even easier!

Follow the setup instructions

Set your general hours here – don't worry you can make changes later

Connect your calendar if you are not using Gmail.

This is an important step as if you add a meeting to your calendar they can not schedule a session at the same time!

If you use Gmail you will already have your calendar connected to check for conflicts!

Calendly is FREE for 1 meeting type forever.

Modify the first event type to your needs as follows

Press Edit

Press What event is this?

Name your Event

Add a custom location with your therapy link

Add a description and modify event link name

Press save

Click when can people book this event?

Change the event duration to your therapy session length

Set your date range

I recommend setting this to the week you will start therapy ONLY

Press apply

Set your time zone if needed

Set what hours you are available for therapy sessions

Click one of the time blocks

Set this to all day of the week, or just apply to the 1 date

Repeat for each day of the week

Personalize the Additional Options as needed

This is where I think Calendly is AMAZING

Click Advanced options on the When can people book this event:

Availabilty Increments = Therapy Session length

Max events per day = do you have a max amount of sessions per day?

Event Buffers = do you schuedule sessions with 5 minutes free before each? Play with that info here!

Go view how it looks on the live page. Make modifications if needed.

Click home

Copy your link and put it into a Welcome Letter!

Hopefully, at least some of your families can self-select occupational therapy session times for distance learning and you will have little manual scheduling or changes.

If Calendly set it up correctly it is also easy to add in new sessions later!

Be sure to see our next post in our ‘Start the Therapy Distance Learning Year Off Right' series!