Guide
Time blocking when your calendar is your product
Time blocking advice is usually written for office workers hiding from meetings. When you sell your hours directly, the game is different: every blocked hour is unsold inventory — but the right blocks make the sellable hours worth more.
Block the work that isn’t appointments
Inventory, cleaning, content, numbers — the business runs on work nobody books. Unblocked, it leaks into evenings or doesn’t happen. Give it a standing slot (a weekly 90-minute block beats daily crumbs) and treat it as booked: your bookable hours simply end where it begins. In Reservy, your open/close hours and closed days define what’s ever bookable — shape them around these blocks.
Batch by service type where you can
Context switching costs real minutes: color setups, table re-rigs, mental gear changes. If your work has heavy and light modes, steer them into zones — mornings for long services, afternoons for quick ones — by what you offer when. You can’t force it fully with self-serve booking, but nudges work: open your longest services’ slots earlier in the day.
Protect one honest buffer
Not buffers everywhere — one. A daily 30-minute block (late morning works well) that absorbs the overrun, the emergency squeeze-in, or simply lunch that survives. Days with a pressure valve run calm; days without one run late from noon onward.
Close days like you mean it
The day off that’s “technically bookable if someone insists” isn’t a day off — it’s on-call. Mark it closed so nothing can book it, and let the schedule say no for you. Rest that’s structurally protected actually happens.
Frequently asked questions
Won’t blocking hours cost me revenue?
Blocked admin time isn’t lost revenue — it’s work that was going to happen anyway, now happening inside working hours instead of your evening. And a rested operator at sustainable hours out-earns a burned-out one within a quarter.
How do I block a partial day?
Your open/close hours handle the edges (open at 10 instead of 9), closed days handle full days, and a break window handles a fixed mid-day block per person. For one-off blocks, book the slot yourself with a placeholder — it takes three taps.