How to see when your friends are free to hang out
“When are you free?” might be the least effective question in any friendship. It puts the work on the other person, it goes stale the moment their week changes, and in a group chat it produces the famous thread where five people answer, nobody overlaps, and the plan quietly dies.
The fix isn't asking better. It's not having to ask at all.
Why you can never keep track of who's free
Your friends' free time lives in five different places: their work schedule, their personal calendar, their partner's plans, the trip they mentioned once, and their general "I'm useless before noon" preferences. No group chat message captures all of that, and it changes weekly. What you actually need is a living picture of everyone's time that updates itself, without anyone having to broadcast their life to a feed.
How availability sharing works in HangTime
HangTime treats availability as something you share once and control forever, instead of something you re-answer every time someone asks:
- Your work schedule. Set your typical week: which days you work and, optionally, your hours. Working a day without set hours blocks the whole day; set hours block just those hours. One-off changes get a day override that wins for that date.
- Your available hours. A general "when I'm usually up to hang" window, so nobody suggests 7 AM coffee to a night owl.
- Your events. Anything on your HangTime calendar, including events imported from Google Calendar, Outlook, or a shift app, counts as busy time.
- Your rules. You choose who sees your availability: anyone, followers, close friends, or only you. Friends see free time, not your reasons: a hidden event can display as a simple busy block, or as free if you'd rather the time look open.
Seeing a friend's free time
Once you follow each other, open a friend's profile and you're looking at their calendar the way they've chosen to show it to you: free days, busy blocks, and small briefcase marks on the days they work. See a wide-open Saturday? Tap the day and send a hang for that date, right from their calendar. No "are you around?" required. You already know.
For groups, Find Time does the comparison for you across everyone at once, but even one-on-one, just being able to look changes how often you see people. The friction of asking is usually the whole reason the hang doesn't happen.
What your friends can and can't see
This only works if sharing your time doesn't feel like surveillance, so the defaults are conservative and everything is a dial:
- Availability visibility: anyone / followers / close friends / only me.
- Every event has its own privacy tier: public, open, closed, or private.
- "Only me" still powers your own planning; it's just invisible to everyone else.
There's no feed showing where you were, no activity log, no read receipts on your life. Friends see when you're free to hang. That's it, because that's the only part that matters.
Stop asking. Start seeing.
Get HangTime free