Get started with Weekstead

Connect Google Calendar, configure Room Booking, and keep your team’s out-of-office events visible on a shared calendar.

Weekstead is an invitation-only closed beta for Google Workspace teams.

Connect Google Calendar

Sign in with your work Google account.
Confirm your timezone and your personal working days and hours on Timezone & work schedule. A new schedule starts as Monday through Friday, 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM. You can switch between 12-hour and 24-hour times.
Connect Google Calendar when Weekstead asks for Calendar access and grant all requested permissions. Weekstead opens room selection and automatically searches the last 90 days of your primary calendar for room resources. Choose the rooms to add and save them to open Room preferences. Access checks and an optional room-name suggestion can continue in the background; a room is booked only after its access is confirmed.
Continue through setup for Room Booking, Team OOO, or both. Once Calendar authorization is saved, Weekstead finishes connection setup automatically. You can leave and return later.

Your Google Workspace administrator may need to approve Weekstead before you can connect Calendar.

You can change your personal schedule later in User preferences → Work schedule. Focus Time uses it for scheduling and Slack Status uses it to identify after-hours. Saving it does not enable either feature. Team OOO has no team-wide hours setting; its optional notification filter can use each member’s saved active hours without using working days.

If you select Finish later, Weekstead opens the dashboard. You can configure the features there later. If you skipped timezone confirmation, open User preferences and select Save timezone before connecting Calendar. Finishing the guide does not mean every feature is active; check its status.

Use your dashboard

The dashboard shows each capability’s status, configuration, and recorded results. Use its Configure action to change preferences, or View activity to review outcomes. Recent activity combines Room Booking, Team OOO, Slack Status, and Focus Time records available to you. Select View all to open the complete Activity history. Team OOO entries summarize a shared-calendar update, rather than individual people’s events.

The status dot summarizes the automations you have enabled. Green means their current status checks found them running normally. Features you have not enabled do not prevent green, and saved Focus Time preferences do not count as running automation. Open the status details for an explanation and a link to the relevant settings when a check needs review or is unavailable. The dot checks the Calendar automations and Slack Status listed in its details. It does not verify scheduled notification delivery or Room Booking digest delivery. Known Team OOO notification faults remain visible until resolved; green is not a guarantee of future provider outcomes.

Weekly counts use Monday through Sunday in your saved timezone, or UTC if none has been saved. Bookings this week counts confirmed new room bookings, excluding previews and room upgrades. Calendar changes this week counts recorded additions, changes, and removals from finished Team OOO updates, including updates that finished with partial errors. If you belong to several teams, the card names the team its status and counts describe. The Recent activity panel repeats these totals as Room bookings and Team OOO changes. Its Team OOO total is for the named team, while the status dot checks all your enabled teams.

Select Refresh to update the overview. Returning to the tab also refreshes it when the last successful read is at least a minute old. This refresh does not force a Calendar update. If refreshing fails, the previous information stays visible with a notice. Unavailable means the result could not be loaded, rather than that the count is zero. The status dot becomes unavailable when its checks expire, even while old activity remains visible. Select Refresh to check again. The page does not continuously refresh itself.

The Calendar connection footer shows when your primary Calendar was last successfully read, when that time is available. This does not mean all downstream automation has finished. Expand Calendar access for authorization, Calendar update connection, and disconnect controls.

Connecting Calendar updates starts a background request. Use Refresh to check when updates are connected. If a saved change cannot refresh its summary, refresh the dashboard before submitting that same action again.

Focus Time

Saved working hours and Lunch guidance do not enable scheduling by themselves. Focus Time scheduling works independently of native Calendar Focus Time bookings and can move user-authorized flexible meeting occurrences within saved rules, using Google primary calendars while keeping the meeting’s duration, attendees, and attached resources. It does not require Team OOO activation or Room Booking setup.

The optional preference Book Focus Time events on my Calendar is saved on Focus Time Settings and is off by default. With it on, and with Just me scheduling enabled, each scheduling check books a Focus Time event into every free stretch inside your work schedule that is at least as long as your Just me protected free time, at most two per day. Events start at the beginning of the stretch. If you move or delete one of these events in Calendar, Weekstead leaves your change alone for the rest of that week. Turning the preference off removes the future events Weekstead created. The page reports booked time, unbooked free time, and any conflicted or failed bookings separately.

To configure Focus Time scheduling:

You can save a personal work schedule on Timezone & work schedule during guided onboarding, or later in User preferences → Work schedule. Monday through Friday are selected when you have no saved schedule. Enter your active hours before saving. Existing schedules keep their saved days.

From a Team detail page, select Configure Focus Time scheduling for this team, or select Configure scheduling on the dashboard’s Focus Time card.
On Focus Time Settings, select Just me to schedule for yourself, or choose a team under Scheduling group. You don’t need a team to use Just me.
Under Your scheduling preferences, enable Allow automatic scheduling for this group, enter Protected free time (minutes), Meeting-load target (minutes), and Overload sensitivity, then select Save scheduling preferences. Your work schedule and confirmed timezone and connected Google Calendar are required. Your preferences and permission belong to the selected group. They are not copied from another group.
Under Calendar Focus Time events, select Book Focus Time events on my Calendar to save the optional booking preference. It saves immediately, requires a connected Google Calendar to turn on, and books events only through your Just me scheduling with its saved protected free time.
Under Meetings you allow Weekstead to move, select Load eligible meetings. Choose one Meeting occurrence, enter its First allowed day, Last allowed day, Window start, and Window end, then select Allow this meeting to move. The allowed date range is inclusive and can span at most seven days. Use Disable meeting movement to revoke a saved occurrence permission.
Use Request scheduling check to request a current check, Cancel scheduling to cancel the current check, or Refresh status to reload the result.

Scheduling runs automatically after the participant and organizer permissions are saved; there is no per-run approval or Apply step. The current horizon is one absolute week (168 hours) from the next 15-minute boundary. Allowed times use a 15-minute grid. A recurring meeting can be selected as one expanded occurrence, but the permission does not cover its series or other occurrences.

Every non-resource attendee must be an active participating member of the same group with usable Calendar access, a saved work schedule, and complete scheduling preferences. Unknown, external, non-participating, or incomplete attendees keep the meeting unchanged. A meeting can have at most 20 unique non-resource attendees, including its organizer, and a related scheduling group can have at most 100 participants. Resources such as rooms are preserved and do not count as people, but current resource availability and Room Booking operations can prevent a move.

With Just me, an otherwise eligible occurrence involving only you may move when you explicitly allow it. Unselected events and meetings with other people remain fixed. Having no events that can move is a valid state; it does not mean you need to create a team.

An occurrence already selected in another group cannot be selected here, even if you disabled its movement there. Moving an occurrence between groups is not supported. You can manage its existing permission in the original group while you still have access to that group.

Weekstead keeps other relevant busy calendar context fixed. Existing fixed commitments can overlap each other. Weekstead keeps those fixed overlaps, reports them as retained context, and does not move either fixed commitment. An overlap involving a meeting you allowed Weekstead to move is a movable conflict. Weekstead looks for a complete schedule with no movable conflicts before moving any selected meeting. Off-grid events, out-of-rule placements, or a boundary the current calendar projection cannot represent can show Calendar context needs attention for the affected group. Weekstead does not silently round those facts.

For a calendar without a movable conflict, a meeting change is applied only when it improves the saved scheduling score. A movable-conflict repair has a different rule: a complete repair takes priority even when the soft score ties or gets worse. It is shown as a conflict repair, not as an improvement in scheduling quality. Weekstead does not apply a partial repair. If no allowed move can resolve the conflict, the result says No allowed meeting move resolved the conflict. If the search reaches its limit before finding a repair, it says Scheduling search ended before conflict repair. The unchanged calendar remains in place in both cases. A search limit is not a promise that no better schedule exists for an otherwise acceptable calendar.

Where available, the result shows before and after overlap minutes for fixed commitments and movable conflicts. These are the overlapping time for each person, counted once when intervals overlap. Meeting load and free time also use occupied-time unions, while the underlying calendar events remain separate.

If one independent scheduling group settles without a calendar change, other independent groups can still be processed. An unresolved provider operation, partial change, cancellation, or changed calendar stops the work that depends on it. A later selected meeting skipped after that stop is shown as Meeting was not attempted after scheduling stopped, rather than as unchanged.

Results appear in Scheduling status, Your recent scheduling results, and Activity. They can include Meeting changes applied, No meeting change was needed, Scheduling conflict repaired, Fixed overlapping commitments remain, No allowed meeting move resolved the conflict, Scheduling search ended before conflict repair, Meeting could not be scheduled, Scheduling reached a configured limit, Calendar context needs attention, Calendar changed before scheduling completed, Scheduling was cancelled, Some meeting changes were applied, Scheduling needs attention, Meeting was not attempted after scheduling stopped, or Scheduling could not finish. Activity shows your own categorical result and confirmed meeting-time changes; it does not show other participants’ settings or calendar details.

Room Booking

Room Booking uses attendees’ available working-location information to size rooms and your saved room rules to choose among suitable rooms. On a meeting you organize, it can add, replace, or remove rooms. On a meeting organized by someone else, it can add a room only when the organizer allows guests to invite others and does not hide the guest list. It does not remove existing rooms on a meeting you do not organize. If a room it requested declines, Weekstead can request another room, but the declined room stays attached until the organizer removes it. Activity explains this and asks you to have the organizer remove it. It preserves human-added rooms and rooms with uncertain ownership. It removes an extra managed room only when a suitable room remains accepted for that local group.

During guided setup, choose rooms and save to open Room preferences right away. Access checks continue in the background. Only enabled, validated rooms can be booked; a pending or failed check does not stop you finishing setup. After the guide, use Rooms to add rooms manually or find rooms from recent meetings. Disabling a room stops new bookings into it and leaves existing meetings where they are. Deleting a room also moves meetings booked in it when another of your rooms fits, and otherwise leaves them in place.
In the guide’s Room preferences step, use Room location to set an office fallback and optional preferred floor when those distinctions are useful for your organization. Not Applicable means the setup does not need office distinctions; it keeps the existing fallback and does not mean room booking ignores location. If room checks are still pending, the summary can show Checking locations. If several offices are available or Weekstead cannot determine an automatic default, the summary says Choose an office. Choose a room location or enter an office manually, or continue setup and choose later. Use Room priority to order rooms to try first. The guide shows Extra seats directly when it is the only other useful option. When other room options are available, open More room options to choose listed room features, edit or remove a saved required location, or allow a saved excluded room again. A saved feature requirement remains even when no current room lists that feature; remove it to stop requiring it. New required locations and new room exclusions remain in Room booking settings. Select Save and continue. If none of your rooms is enabled, Save and choose rooms saves your preferences before returning you to room selection.
After the guide, open Room booking to set what a room must have, which rooms to try first, and which rooms never to book. For preferences shared with guided setup, Room booking uses different labels: Default office location and Preferred floor for location, Preferred rooms for priority, and Space for attendees with unknown locations for extra seats. See Must, prefer, never.
Check Room booking status. When it is active, Weekstead may manage eligible meetings. Calendar access, connected Calendar updates, and an enabled, validated room are required. A pause or temporary unavailability prevents new room changes even when setup is ready.
Review recorded results in Activity.

Room location combines the office fallback and preferred floor. The office applies only when your calendar has no applicable office working location. Working from home and custom or unknown working locations do not use this fallback. A preferred floor helps rank rooms; it is not a room requirement. A room without office details appears as Office not specified in the office choices. If validation or an accepted room-name suggestion later identifies one office, Weekstead updates the automatic fallback. If several offices are available or Weekstead cannot establish an automatic default, choose a room location or enter an office manually. You can also finish setup and choose later. An office choice you make yourself stays unchanged.

Extra seats is shown directly in the guide when there are no other useful room options. When other room options are available, it appears inside More room options. It applies to meetings you organize and covers attendees whose location Weekstead does not know, not invitations that have not been answered. By default, their seats count toward your eligible in-person group. If you are not at an eligible office, they count toward the largest eligible group with a participating Weekstead user. If no such group exists, no extra seats are added. You can instead choose the largest group directly or add no extra seats. Each unknown attendee adds at most one seat.

To pause, open Room booking, choose a duration under Pause room booking, and select the pause button. Check the displayed resume time and timezone. You can select Resume now to end the pause early. Calendar updates continue during a pause, and a room change already sent to Google Calendar may still finish. Already-sent changes may also finish during temporary unavailability.

Weekday Slack digest

In Room booking, you can configure the optional Weekday Slack digest for confirmed room changes. It uses a separate Slack webhook and runs at 9 AM on weekdays in your saved timezone. If a save says the digest schedule update is pending, your settings are saved and Weekstead will retry automatically. Disabling the digest stops new deliveries while schedule cleanup finishes.

Must, prefer, never

Your room rules answer three questions. Must and never decide which rooms are possible, and prefer decides which of those to try first.

Must is what a room has to have. Under Room requirements, Must be in this location takes a campus, building, or floor, and Must have these features takes listed features such as AV or VC. A room that fails any requirement is not booked, even if it is on your preferred list. A room whose location or required feature is unknown fails that requirement. Your default office is not a requirement. It only tells Weekstead where to look when your calendar has no working location for the day.

Prefer is which rooms to try first. Under Room preferences, order your Preferred rooms and set a preferred floor. Weekstead tries preferred rooms in order, then the other suitable rooms. Among those it keeps the same room or floor as an adjacent meeting when it can, and otherwise chooses the smallest room that fits.

Never is which rooms Weekstead must not book. Add them under Never-use rooms. A room cannot be both preferred and never-use.

When several Weekstead users attend a meeting in the same office, their requirements and never-use rooms combine, so a room has to satisfy everyone. Preferences are a compromise: Weekstead picks the room that ranks best across the group, and a connected organizer breaks ties. Activity explains the result without naming whose settings applied.

Room features come from room names. Add {features} to your naming pattern in Rooms so Weekstead reads listed features such as AV from a name like HQ-3 AV Alder, and check the features shown for each room there. This records what a name lists; it does not verify the room’s physical equipment. A room-name suggestion does not infer features. Feature coverage in guided setup counts your enabled, currently validated rooms after exclusions, including rooms with unknown feature information and rooms outside your default office. Each per-feature count is independent; the combined count requires every selected feature and location condition. These counts describe recorded room details, not meeting availability, capacity fit, or a future booking. If no room lists a required feature, no room is booked and Activity records the reason.

Room-name suggestions

If Weekstead offers a room-name pattern, review its building and floor examples before applying it. You can keep selecting and importing rooms while the suggestion is prepared. A suggestion that finishes after you save rooms is also available in Room preferences, and remains available in Rooms for a limited time. Applying it is optional and can update compatible room location details.

If a name’s building or floor is uncertain, Weekstead shows the uncertain details and leaves the format unapplied. You can dismiss those details or use the naming editor while continuing to choose rooms.

Applying a suggestion updates compatible selected rooms and saves the pattern for future imports. Existing room details that cannot safely be changed stay as they are, and the result shows how many rooms were updated or left unchanged. Use the naming editor in Rooms to adjust the pattern.

When enabled, suggestions use Groq to analyze a small sample of your room names. Ordinary room selection and parsing do not require a new model request.

Team OOO

Team OOO keeps connected members’ out-of-office events visible on one shared team calendar. It does not manage leave requests, balances, or approvals.

If you were invited to an existing team, accept the invitation and connect your calendar. The team owner manages the shared calendar, schedule, notifications, source-event matching, and start/stop controls.

To set up a team you own:

Create the team.
On Team calendar, select a shared calendar you can edit, or choose Create and share calendar to create a new one. Confirm the name and timezone. Creating a managed Google calendar requests additional permission to create it and share viewer access with accepted members. For an existing calendar, give your team view access in Google Calendar.
Add teammates on the same page by entering each person’s work email and selecting Send invitation. Weekstead emails a private invitation that expires after seven days. The recipient must sign in with that address in the same organization and select Accept invitation; opening the email does not join them to the team. Sending another invitation to that address replaces the earlier one, and accepting, declining, or letting it expire makes its link unusable. After a teammate accepts, Weekstead may grant viewer access to a managed Google calendar. You can continue without inviting anyone or waiting for them to join or connect.
Select Continue to schedule & notifications, then choose the team’s timezone and optional notification destination. You can also choose Only include absences during working hours to filter timed notification entries by each member’s saved active hours. A notification destination belongs to this team. Select Save schedule to save these choices.
Have accepted members connect their calendars. Every member must be connected before you select Start Team OOO. Saving settings or finishing the guide alone does not start updates.

Returning to Team calendar during setup shows the saved calendar details, sharing status, members, and pending invitations. Use Open in Google Calendar to open the selected Google calendar. For a Weekstead-managed Google calendar, Edit calendar details lets the owner change the calendar name and timezone. Saving the timezone also updates the team timezone used for notifications. For an existing calendar, only the team timezone can be changed here.

If the team configuration changes while a new calendar is being created, Weekstead keeps the created calendar for your review. Choose Use this calendar to select it after reviewing the current destination and any sharing changes, or Keep current configuration to leave the current selection in place. Keeping the current configuration does not delete the unselected calendar from Google Calendar. If creation is still uncertain, use the recovery action to check the original attempt rather than creating another calendar.

Transferring team ownership ends the former owner’s unfinished creation flow. The new owner chooses or creates a calendar using their own Calendar access. A creation request already started by the former owner may still finish in Google Calendar, but it cannot become the team’s selection after transfer.

The owner can set Match event names in Team OOO configuration. It is selected by default. When selected, Weekstead includes events with “OOO” in the name or names starting with “Out of office”, alongside events marked as out of office by the calendar provider. Clear it to use only provider-marked out-of-office events for member source selection.

Notifications include all eligible absences by default. Select Only include absences during working hours to include timed absences only when they overlap each person’s saved hours in User preferences, or 9 AM–5 PM if they have not saved a schedule. Each person’s home timezone is used. This setting checks hours, not their saved working days. All-day absences remain included, as do entries whose person or timezone cannot be identified. The setting affects the notification and its preview. Shared-calendar updates continue to include all eligible absences. Notifications are scheduled for 9 AM Monday–Friday in the team timezone.

When active, Team OOO checks calendars hourly and copies out-of-office events to the shared calendar. It leaves members’ source events unchanged. For an existing calendar, accepting a Weekstead team invitation does not grant access to that calendar; its sharing is managed in Google Calendar.

The owner can select Update shared calendar now on the team page to request an update while Team OOO is active and every member is connected. Stop Team OOO stops scheduled updates and notifications and starts cleanup of Weekstead’s managed copies. Check the team status if cleanup needs attention. The owner can use Start Team OOO again when setup is ready.

Permissions and privacy

Signing in identifies your Weekstead account. Weekstead requests Google Calendar access separately when a feature needs it.

To disconnect, expand Calendar access in the dashboard’s Recent activity panel, then select Disconnect calendar. Disconnection stops new automation and starts removal of Weekstead’s Calendar connection and scheduled updates. It is a background process, so the initial confirmation means disconnection has started.

If you have no automation enabled and have not signed in for 90 days, Weekstead disconnects your Calendar automatically. Your account and saved configuration stay, and you can reconnect at any time.

To delete an account, ask your organization to contact Weekstead. The account cannot sign in from the moment of the request and is removed from its teams at once. A 30-day grace period follows. After that period, periodic processing deletes the account once required cleanup is complete. There is no fixed completion date. If you own a team with other members, transfer ownership first.

Room inventories and Room Booking records belong to the connected user. Team OOO settings and notification destinations belong to the team that configured them.

When something needs attention

If Calendar access is authorized and setup is still progressing, Weekstead continues automatically. You can leave the Calendar step or dashboard and return later.
If Calendar authorization has expired or been removed, reconnect and grant all requested Calendar permissions.
If the room search cannot start or finish, use its retry action on Choose your rooms. You can also add a room by email or set up Room Booking later. No results means the search finished without finding room resources, not that your Calendar connection failed.
If room validation fails, confirm that your account can view the room in Google Calendar, then use Retry failed rooms when offered in Rooms. You can finish the guide while you repair access; Weekstead will not book a failed room.
If no writable calendar is available for Team OOO, create one in Google Calendar or ask for edit access, then refresh the calendar list in Weekstead.
If Team OOO is not ready to start, check member connections and the shared calendar. Members who have connected should ask the owner to complete the remaining team setup.
If Team OOO shows Needs attention, follow the action beside its status. The owner can use Open troubleshooting and Repair automatic updates when those actions are offered.

Still need help?

Use the support contact included with your closed-beta invitation, or return to Weekstead.