Fridays only, please — weekday filter on availability sharing

"When can we meet?" is an innocent question for anyone on a regular 9-to-5. For a parent who has the kids every other week, or a nurse rolling through a three-week shift pattern, the same question is a twenty-minute puzzle.

Today we're rolling out a weekday filter on shared availability — so you can answer "I can only do Fridays" with a checkbox instead of explaining your whole family life.

What it solves

Until now our availability sharing did something fairly blunt: it pulled your free slots for the next eight weeks and listed all of them. Great if your week is symmetric. Less great if seven of eight possible slots are days you actually can't.

Concrete example: you have the kids every other weekend, so you can really only meet on Fridays for the next two months. The previous version showed roughly ten weeks × five weekdays = ~50 slots, of which you only meant about eight. The recipient picked the first available Thursday, you had to cancel, and a sheepish email exchange ensued.

Now you can constrain it: "Show Fridays only." The recipient sees eight slots. No ambiguous choices, no false positives.

How it works

1. Create a share as usual: Calendar → Share availability → pick time window and slot length.
2. New step: choose which weekdays count as bookable. Default is all seven. Uncheck the ones you don't want. Want Fridays only — uncheck the other six.
3. Send the link. The recipient sees a page that filters slots automatically. Mon–Thu, Sat–Sun are simply gone — they don't even appear as "busy".
4. Book. Recipient picks from days you actually have, and you get a confirmation just like before.

Filtering happens before the slot list renders, so for a family that only offers Saturdays a two-month window shrinks from ~60 candidate slots to eight. The recipient takes under thirty seconds to choose.

Common use cases

Co-parenting with shared custody. You have the kids on certain weeks and want to take meetings only on the others. Filter the weekdays that map to non-kid weeks and stop juggling.

Shift workers. You work nights Mon–Wed, days Fri, off Thu and weekends. Offer only Thursdays and weekends for a coffee — otherwise someone will want to meet right before your night shift starts.

Parents with fixed pickups. Tuesday and Thursday at 5 pm are locked (gymnastics, music school). Filter those days out of the "coffee" share entirely.

Hybrid work from a summer cabin. You're only in the office Wednesday and Thursday — make an internal share that surfaces just those two days.

Technical — for the curious

We added an allowed_weekdays int[] column on the availability_shares table in migration 0058. A CHECK constraint enforces <@ ARRAY[1,2,3,4,5,6,7] so no invalid values can sneak in. The get_availability_share_by_slug RPC now returns the field, and the recipient page filters incoming slots with a Set of allowed days — no server recompute, just an O(1) check per slot. Default is NULL (all days), so existing shares keep behaving exactly as before.

We considered letting you pick specific dates instead, but landed on a weekday filter because it matches how people actually think about their lives: "Tuesdays are bad", not "October 21 is bad".

A small, calm improvement

This is one of those features that sounds trivial when you describe it but actually removes a recurring friction we kept seeing in support. For parents in a shared-custody arrangement, "when can we meet" is close to half the mental load of scheduling.

The weekday filter is live today in the iOS app and on familyboard.io. Nothing to enable — it shows up as an optional step the next time you open Share availability.