Hands-On with nylas calendar find-time: Find available meeting times across multiple participants

#cli #calendar #scheduling #productivity

Calendar management belongs in the terminal too. nylas calendar find-time works with Google Calendar, Outlook, and Exchange.

The nylas calendar find-time command queries free/busy data for all --participants and returns time slots where everyone is available. Specify --duration in minutes and --days for the search window.

Syntax

nylas calendar find-time --participants EMAILS --duration MINUTES [--days N]

How It Works

Calendar APIs are notoriously inconsistent across providers. Google Calendar uses RFC 5545 recurrence rules, Outlook uses its own format, and Exchange has yet another. The Nylas CLI normalizes all of this behind a consistent interface.

Examples

Find a 30-minute slot for two people:

nylas calendar find-time --participants alice@example.com,bob@example.com --duration 30

Search 10 days ahead for a 1-hour meeting:

nylas calendar find-time --participants team-leads@example.com --duration 60 --days 10 --json

Common Issues

No available times found
Increase --days to widen the search window, or reduce --duration. Heavily booked calendars may have no common free slots in 5 days.

Participant availability not returned
Free/busy sharing must be enabled on the participant's calendar. Google Workspace shares free/busy by default; personal Gmail accounts may not.

Tips

CI/CD ready: This command works in non-interactive mode. Set NYLAS_API_KEY as an environment variable and it picks up credentials automatically.

Pipe to jq: nylas calendar find-time --json | jq '.' gives you structured data you can filter and transform.

Full docs: nylas calendar find-time reference — all flags, advanced examples, and troubleshooting.

All commands: Nylas CLI Command Reference

Get started: brew install nylas/nylas-cli/nylas — other install methods