How to send your availability in a Teams message

A lot of scheduling has moved out of email and into Teams chat, and the request is the same — "when are you free?" — but the medium punishes the email habits. Long messages get skimmed. Line breaks disappear if you paste the wrong way. In a group chat, five people offering times produces a thread nobody can resolve. Here is how to send availability in Teams so the reply is one word.

Keep it to one message

In email, a list of times can sit in a longer note. In Teams, the list is the message. Lead with the two facts the other person needs — how long, and which timezone — then the times, then the ask. Nothing else.

30 min, times Eastern (New York): Tue — 10:00–11:30 AM, 2:30–4:00 PM Wed — 9:00–11:00 AM Thu — 1:00–3:30 PM Reply with one and I'll send the invite.

One line per day, windows rather than single moments, three to five options in total. The reasoning behind those choices is in how to write an availability email; it applies unchanged, just shorter.

Make the line breaks survive

Teams has one habit that wrecks pasted lists: in the plain compose box, Enter sends. Two ways around it:

• Use the expanded compose box. Click the Format button (the "A" with a pen) before you paste. In that box, Enter adds a new line and sending is a separate button, so a multi-line list pastes as a list.
• Paste plain text. A list copied as plain text keeps its line breaks in Teams. Text copied from a formatted document sometimes arrives as one paragraph; if that happens, paste it into the expanded box instead.

If you are typing rather than pasting, Shift+Enter adds a line without sending.

In a group chat, offer windows that work for everyone

The failure mode of group-chat scheduling is that each person posts their own availability and someone has to intersect five lists by eye. Do the intersection first, then post one set of windows the whole group can say yes to:

Trying to find 45 min for the four of us next week (times Central, Chicago): Mon — 9:30–11:00 AM Wed — 10:00–12:00 PM, 3:00–4:30 PM Thu — 1:00–3:00 PM Thumbs-up the one that works; first to three wins.

Two details do the work: the times are already the overlap of everyone's calendars, and the decision rule is stated up front so the thread ends instead of drifting. A reaction is a cheaper reply than a message, and Teams counts them for you.

Across time zones, write the times in theirs

If the other person is in London and you are in New York, post the times in London time and say so. Converting is your job, not theirs, and it is where most cross-timezone scheduling goes wrong. When you're not sure where two working days overlap, the meeting time finder shows the shared window for any pair of cities, and you can paste the result straight into the chat.

Where the times come from

Everything above assumes you already know when you — or the group — are free, as text. Reading that off a calendar and typing it is the slow part, and it is where the timezone mistakes happen.

OpenSlot produces the list for you. Sign in with the Microsoft 365 account you already use, pick "Just me" for your own availability or "Me + others" to merge colleagues' calendars, choose the timezone and the window (up to 60 days on Pro, seven on the free plan), and click Copy. The list is plain text, grouped by day with one slot per line, so it pastes into Teams — expanded compose box or not — with the line breaks intact. It uses only free/busy and stores no calendar data. Every new account starts with a 14-day trial of Pro, no card required, and a free plan continues after that; the help center has the details. If you would rather build the list by hand, copying free/busy times from Outlook as text walks through the manual route.