My Booking Page Said Come Back in October

By Junaid Ahmed

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I opened my own booking page last week the way a guest would.

The first date I could offer anyone was October 1st. It was July 31st.

My Thursdays were empty. I knew they were empty. I had been telling people to grab a slot, and the page had been quietly telling them the soonest I could talk was two months away.

The thing I never thought about

Google Calendar has a feature called Working Location. It's the little "Home" or "Office" tag that shows where you're working each day. I turned it on in 2021 and forgot it existed.

Here's what I didn't know: Google stores that tag as an all-day event. On every single weekday. Forever.

When PodGlue asked Google "when is Junaid busy?", Google handed back my real meetings, and also 46 of those Working Location markers, one on every weekday for the next two months. PodGlue counted all of them as busy.

I only record interviews on Thursdays. Every Thursday had a "Home" tag on it. So every Thursday was blocked.

The part that fooled me longest

October looked available. I assumed that meant October was genuinely free and something was wrong with the earlier months.

It wasn't. PodGlue only asked Google about the next 60 days. October was past that line, so there was no data at all, and no data rendered as "wide open."

So the page was wrong in both directions at once. It hid the weeks I could actually record, and it advertised weeks it knew nothing about. A guest could page forward to the fall and book straight on top of something I'd already committed to.

That's worse than being broken, because a broken page tells you something is wrong. This one just quietly sent people away, and quietly double-booked the ones who kept clicking.

What I actually fixed

Two things, and they're opposite sides of the same coin.

An event only blocks your calendar now if it genuinely takes up time. Google already marks Working Location as "Free", we just weren't reading that flag. Same for birthdays, and for meetings you've declined. If you turned something down, you're not busy. All-day events you did mark as busy, a vacation, a day off, now block the right day; they used to shift by a few hours, so a day off could bleed into the evening before it.

After that change, my first Thursday went from zero slots to twenty-two.

And the page now checks your calendar for whatever month the guest is looking at. Click forward to September, it pulls September. Click again, it pulls October. Nothing is offered on a month until the answer comes back, so nobody can click a date while the page is still asking.

The calendar also stops now. Guests can book up to 60 days out and no further, the arrow greys out and the page says "Booking open through" with the date. That's a bound I can actually trust, because it's exactly as far as the data goes. If you don't have Google Calendar connected, nothing changes for you; your availability windows work as they always have.

Why I'm telling you this

No error appeared. Nothing went into a log. No alert fired. Every piece of the system did exactly what it was written to do.

The only reason I found it is that I opened my own booking page and looked at it like a stranger would.

If you use any scheduling tool, mine or anyone else's, go look at your public page right now. Not the settings. The page your guests see. Check that the first date it offers is a date you'd actually accept, then click forward a few months and check that too.

I had 40-plus conversations about why people weren't booking. I never once checked whether the page was letting them.

What's next

Sixty days is a starting number, not a law. If you're booking guests four months out and want a longer window, tell me, the limit is one setting away from being yours to choose.

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The whole point of a booking page is that a guest can pick a time without a single email back and forth. That only works if the times are true.

PodGlue reads your real calendar so the times you offer guests are times you can actually keep. If you've been wondering why nobody books, it's worth checking what your page is telling them.