✓ Schedule a meeting

Effective communication is important for building relationships and completing projects, and sometimes the best form of communication is a face-to-face meeting. That’s why we’ve included a meeting scheduling tool right in Upwork Messages and our mobile app for your convenience.

Link a calendar

Linking a calendar helps you stay on top of your busy schedule. It sends meetings and consultations scheduled on Upwork to your external calendar and automatically syncs your availability.

Supported calendars are:

• Google Calendar
• Microsoft Calendars — Cloud-based Microsoft accounts are supported, but on-premises accounts are not.

Apple iCal or custom domains (even if they are hosted by Google or Microsoft) are not supported.

To link a calendar via Upwork’s website or mobile app, navigate to a conversation and select the calendar icon at the top of the room. This will open the “Connect your calendar” window. You can perform this step in any conversation, even if you do not intend to schedule a meeting in it right away.

You will be prompted to sign into your Microsoft or Google account so that we can access your calendar.

Send a meeting invitation

To schedule a meeting, start in the specific meeting room you want to hold the meeting:

1. Select the calendar icon at the top of the page. If you have not linked a calendar, the Connect your calendar window will open. You can connect a calendar or choose the Skip button.
2. On the Share your availability window, select the time zone and the days and times you are typically available for meetings. Using the copy icon, you can copy available times from one day to another.
3. Choose Next, and select 15, 30, 45, or 60 minutes.
4. Select the Send button. A meeting invite link will be sent to the conversation, and everyone in the room will be able to access it.

Note that if a time is booked on your external calendar, even if you marked it as available while creating the meeting invitation, it will show as unavailable to other users.

Schedule a meeting

After you send a meeting invite, other participants in the room can select the automatically generated Schedule a meeting link, which opens the scheduling window.

This window is split into two sections. The left-hand section includes a calendar with the invite sender’s available dates highlighted. Once the recipient chooses a date, the sender’s available times for that date appear.

If the sender has an external calendar linked, their available times will reflect that. For example, if you are available on Upwork from 9 am to 5 pm, but your linked external calendar has activities scheduled from 3 pm to 5 pm, your availability on Upwork will display as 9 am to 3 pm.

Linking a calendar is optional for meeting invitation respondents. They can simply select a day from the calendar to gain access to available time slots.

When the respondent has chosen a day and time, and selected the Confirm button, the meeting is automatically scheduled. The meeting sender will have the event automatically added to their calendar, if they have one synced. All other participants will receive a system message with an Add to calendar link that they can use to manually add the meeting to their own calendars.

Reschedule or cancel a meeting

Sometimes things come up and you can’t make a meeting. You can cancel or reschedule if necessary.

After a meeting is scheduled, the message remains in the room and includes Cancel and Reschedule links. To do either, simply select the link and follow the steps.

You’ll have the option to enter a reason for rescheduling or canceling. You may consider following up with a message too as appropriate.

Join a meeting

Those with synced calendars or who manually added an event to their calendars will be able to join the meeting via the link in the calendar event. You can also join via the Join the meeting link in your conversation.

Frequently Asked questions