Office hours for clients: stop being interrupted all day

Instead of answering every "quick call?" as it comes, open fixed office hours your clients can book: for example 15- and 30-minute slots on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. Clients get a guaranteed time with you, you get uninterrupted blocks for the actual work, and urgent problems keep their own channel. Describe what each call is for, ask for the context in the booking note, and adjust the number of slots to your workload.

For a developer, a sysadmin or a database specialist, a ten-minute call in the middle of a debugging session can cost far more than ten minutes: the time to get back into the problem is lost too. Spread over a week, those interruptions eat the deep work your clients are actually paying for.

Office hours reverse the logic. Clients know when you're available for questions, and outside those hours you can close your messages and focus.

On Book, each type is a service with its own description and an optional price. You open slots for each at the length it takes, only in the hours you've set aside. For group training, set the number of places on the slot: each participant books one place, and when it's full, the slot is no longer shown.

Put office hours at the edges of your productive time, not in the middle. If you do your best focused work in the morning, open office hours in the afternoon. Two or three blocks a week are a reasonable start for a freelancer with several clients; add more only if they fill up regularly.

To set the pattern once, create a slot and repeat it on the weekdays you choose until an end date. Leave a few minutes between calls to write down what was decided.

The booking form asks for first name, last name, email and phone, plus an optional note. In the service description, ask clients to write what the call is about: the project, the error message or ticket number, the environment concerned, and a link to a shared document if needed. Tell them not to paste passwords, keys or production credentials in the note. You receive an email for each new booking, with the note, so you can look at the problem before the call starts.

Tech clients may be anywhere. Your booking page shows times in your business's time zone and displays its name, so a client in another country knows which zone they're reading. If you work with a region several hours away, open one block at a time that suits both sides, for example early morning or early evening for you.

Book doesn't create video links. Say in the description which tool you use and send the link after the booking.

A production outage doesn't wait for Thursday afternoon. Keep your usual emergency channel, on-call arrangement or support contract for incidents, and say so clearly in the office hours description: "For production incidents, call this number." Office hours are for everything that can wait a day or two.

Office hours only work if clients know about them and trust that they'll get a slot. Announce the change in a short message:

For the first weeks, reply to "quick call?" requests with the link rather than a call. The habit builds as clients see that a slot is always available within a few days.

If you need to move a call, reschedule it from your bookings list and tell the client yourself, since Book doesn't email them when a booking changes. Your calendar syncs with Google, iPhone or Mac, so office hours bookings sit alongside your other meetings. Book costs €5/month, everything included: unlimited bookings and services, no commission and no contract. It doesn't invoice; keep your usual billing.