Meeting Essentials are your default scheduling preferences that guide how Clara sets up your meetings. By configuring these settings on your Dashboard, you can ensure Clara consistently schedules meetings the way you prefer.

You can manage your Meeting Essentials anytime from your Dashboard.

Your timezone is automatically detected when create your account.

Clara will use this timezone when suggesting meeting times to participants unless you specify otherwise.

When to update this:

Tip:
If you're scheduling with someone in a different location, mentioning their timezone or location in your email helps Clara present times clearly for them.

When Clara shares available times with participants, you can control which participants Clara converts your availability into their local time zone for. Clara will only convert times for a participant if their time zone can be clearly detected from the thread, or if you've provided it directly.

Options:

Showing converted times for all participants reduces the chance of someone confirming the wrong time. That said, if Autobook (Internal Meeting Settings) is enabled for your internal participants, they won't need to respond manually — so converting times for them may not be necessary.

When Clara converts and displays your availability for participants, you can set the maximum number of participant time zones shown when sharing meeting times.

Clara will only convert times for a participant if their time zone can be clearly detected from the thread, or if you've provided it directly.

This sets the standard length for your meetings.

Clara will use this duration for all meetings unless you specify a different length in your request.

Example:
If your default is 30 minutes, Clara will schedule 30-minute meetings unless you say something like “schedule a 45-minute call.”

Buffer time adds space before and/or after your meetings to avoid back-to-back scheduling.

You can choose:

When you set a 5- or 10-minute buffer, Clara will shift suggested meeting times to match that buffer. For example, if a meeting ends at 3:00 PM and you have a 5-minute buffer, the next available time will be 3:05 PM (instead of on the hour or half-hour).

Keep your schedule on clean time slots

If you’re using buffers, adjust your meeting durations so your calendar still aligns neatly:

Understand the trade-offs

Choosing the right balance helps Clara schedule efficiently while matching your preferred workflow.

Like regular buffer time, your travel buffer preference tells Clara how much time to block for traveling to in-person meetings. For travel buffer, Clara will add travel events for these travel times directly to your calendar.

Note that this setting cannot currently be overridden by natural language in your email. For example, if a specific meeting requires an hour of travel time, Clara can't apply that as a one-off adjustment to your travel meeting blocks.

If you frequently travel to the same location, you can create a Booking Type for it and set a custom travel buffer that applies whenever that location is used.

This controls how soon Clara can schedule a meeting.

If you don’t provide a timeframe in your request, Clara will use this setting to determine how soon to suggest availability.

Examples:

When Clara shares your availability, this setting controls the maximum number of time options it will offer in a single response.

This setting is most useful if you often request availability across larger time frames, such as "the next few weeks." It allows Clara to suggest times spread across multiple weeks rather than clustering options in the earliest time frame.

Clara can automatically follow up with participants if they don’t respond to a scheduling request.

You can choose how often Clara should follow up until the meeting is scheduled.

Why this helps:

In most cases, the Standard role is the correct choice for your account.

If you believe you need the Operator role or would like to learn more about it, please reach out to Support.

Event Skipping controls how Clara treats existing calendar events when finding availability for a meeting.

By default, Clara treats every "Busy" event as a conflict and will not schedule over it. The settings below only apply when no other time is available.

What to Skip

Categories (available when "Skip specific events" is selected)

Toggle on any of the following event types for Clara to skip: