Out of office
An out of office period marks a range of days when you're away. While it's active you have no bookable slots on any of your event types, and team events (round-robin) skip you so your teammates still get booked. Manage your periods from Availability → Out Of Office.
It's the one-click alternative to adding an "unavailable" date override to every schedule for every day of a trip.
What it is
- A period is an inclusive date range, a first day and a last day, plus an optional note (up to 500 characters) that only you can see.
- It blocks whole days, everywhere: every schedule, every event type, including team events. A date override, by contrast, belongs to one schedule.
- Existing meetings are not canceled. If confirmed meetings fall inside the dates, 42min warns you with a count and a Review meetings link, and rescheduling or canceling them is up to you.
- You can keep several periods at once, and a single period can span up to a year. Periods that have fully passed are cleaned up automatically.
How to do it
- Open Availability → Out Of Office.
- Click + Add out of office and pick the first day and last day (both are away days; a one-day absence uses the same date twice).
- Optionally add a note ("Summer vacation"), visible only to you.
- If confirmed meetings already fall inside those dates, a warning appears with the count and a Review meetings link that opens your meetings filtered to that range. Reschedule or cancel them yourself, and 42min never cancels meetings for you.
- Save. To end an absence early, delete the period (the × next to it) and the days become bookable again immediately.
Out of office, date overrides, or holidays?
Three features block days; they're for different jobs:
| Best for | Scope | |
|---|---|---|
| Out of office (this page) | Vacations, trips, leave (multi-day absences) | Whole days, all schedules and event types |
| Date override | A single date with different hours (or none) | One schedule; can block part of a day |
| Holidays | Your country's public holidays, automatically | Whole days, all your event types |
Tip
A connected AI assistant can manage this for you: "I'm on vacation August 10–14" adds the period, and it reports any meetings that need reviewing.
Common pitfalls
- Meetings booked before the period don't move. Out of office only stops new bookings. Use the Review meetings warning link to deal with what's already on the calendar.
- Away half a day? Out of office blocks whole days only. For a free morning before a flight, use a date override with just the hours you'll work.
- Invitees aren't told why. Your booking page simply shows no slots on those days, and the note is private and never shown to invitees.
- Days are your days. A day is blocked in your time zone (the one on your default schedule): a slot that starts on an away day is blocked, even if your invitee sees it as a different date in their zone.
Last updated July 29, 2026.