Upfront: I built a product, it's live, and I'd like you to look at it. But the reason I built it is the more interesting part - and I suspect a lot of you have this problem far worse than I do.

I run a search firm, so I send my availability constantly. Ten, fifteen times a day when a search is live.

And I won't send a booking link. Not to a candidate I've spent four months trying to reach, not to a client I'm pitching. A booking link asks the other person to do your admin, and there are people you simply don't ask that of.

So I do it manually. Open the calendar, find the gaps, work out what 5pm in the UK means in Chicago, San Francisco and Dallas, get it slightly wrong, correct it, go back to the calendar because I forgot what gaps I have, and then eventually type my availability out. 

Four minutes. Five times a day. Across a working year, that's the better part of a fortnight spent faffing around with my calendar.

So I built the thing

Timely. A small desktop app for Mac and Windows that does one thing, exceptionally well.

You press a keyboard shortcut. Your free slots - or your exec's - land on your clipboard, already converted to the recipient's timezone, grouped by day, ready to paste straight into an email. Three seconds, and your calendar never opens.

No booking page, no link, nothing for the recipient to click. The output is plain text that looks exactly like something you typed yourself, because as far as they're concerned, you did.

It runs on your machine, reading free/busy only - not titles, not attendees - directly from Google or Outlook. Nothing about your calendar leaves your desktop.

It also allows you to add safety limits (so you don't send a 4am slot to someone in Singapore), buffers, set working days and hours, and add multiple calendars.

Why EAs might get more out of this than I do

I built it for my own problem, but you have the harder version of it.

You're running two or three diaries, and you often need the overlap - a cross-referencing job done by eye. Timely pulls combined availability across multiple and delegated calendars in the same keystroke.

And you're doing it on someone else's behalf, which raises the stakes. If I send a clumsy availability email, it's mine. If you send one, it's your principal's.

The honest bit

It's early. We launched on Product Hunt last week, came 5th out of the 1,000 or so products that launched that day, and there are a few hundred people currently trialling it.

It does one thing, deliberately. It isn't a calendar app and I've no intention of making it one.

If you try it and it falls short - a format that doesn't suit how you write, a calendar setup it handles badly, an IT policy it trips over - I'd genuinely rather hear that than not.

Most of what's in it came from people telling me what was missing.

https://trytimely.co

Would love your thoughts and feedback.