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Users need a feature in calendar applications to mark specific time periods as 'unavailable' without disclosing the reason or making the event publicly visible on their calendar. During these periods, any incoming meeting invitations should be automatically declined. The user should still receive a notification of the auto-declined invite and have the option to manually override the decline if desired.
A feature I wish was dedicated/first-class/easy-to-do in the calendar apps I've used, but isn't... Setting a period of unavailability. **PLEASE** I know there's a dozen various different ways to approximate/approach that. I don't need any suggestions for apps or ways to accomplish it. The purpose is *only* to inform anyone else trying to invite me to a meeting that it overlaps with/occurs in my unavailable time, and thus to automatically apply a "no" response from my invite (but to still allow the invite for notification purposes). The invite could tell me it was already auto-declined, but let me decide if I want to override and allow. In fact, I would go so far as to say, my "unavailability" is not even something that should show up publicly to others viewing my calendar... only shows for me. And only "discovered" indirectly by others if they want to invite me to something. It basically serves a similar purpose to an "idle" / "offline" status you might set in your slack/discord app. For example, I might like to just block off my calendar for an hour for mental health sake, perhaps because I need to take a walk or just stare out the window and day dream for a bit. I don't want to tell anyone else I'm doing that, and it's not anyone else's business UNLESS they needed me for a meeting. And I certainly don't want people to know *what* I'm doing during unavailability, but I don't want to have to do silly things like label an event "personal time" or whatever. A period of unavailability would be extremely slimmed down compared to normal "events" or whatever... it wouldn't even have any UI to expose settings for: label, details/description, notifications, privacte/public, busy/free, invitees, location, zoom/google meeting link, etc etc etc. All that stuff is excess noise that actually makes an "unavailability" as a feature less useful. Setting unavailability should be able to be done in 2-3 clicks maximum, less than 10 seconds, or with a single sentence verbalized to a mobile assistant like siri/etc. It might be nice for allowing a setting for recurring, but even that could just be optional fluff. Anyway, I just really wish my calendar apps made this easy. Maybe someday I'll just build my own calendar app to do it.