Marking the days you are booked makes you easier to match, not harder. It is the cheapest advantage available on the platform, it takes seconds, and no amount of spending can substitute for it.
Three states, and one of them is silence
A day can be green (free), red (booked), or unmarked. Unmarked is not a soft no — it genuinely means “I have not said”, and it is treated that way. Most days are unmarked, and that is fine.
This matters, because the alternative would make the calendar compulsory by stealth: if not-marked-free counted against you, every tradie who never opened the calendar would quietly vanish from results.
Why marking yourself BOOKED helps you
It sounds backwards. It is not.
When a customer asks for a specific day, tradies who marked that day booked are removed from the list entirely. You do not get rung about a job you cannot do. The customer does not waste a call. Nobody is annoyed.
Red days and green days count equally towards how much your calendar is trusted, and that is deliberate. A system that only rewarded “I’m free” would pressure people into claiming availability they do not have — which is exactly what makes a calendar worthless.
How trust in your calendar is measured
Two things, multiplied: how much of the near future you have actioned, and how recently you touched it.
Multiplied rather than averaged, on purpose. A full calendar last touched two months ago is not “half right” — stale availability puts you in front of jobs on days you are already booked. Averaging would leave that at a middling score. Multiplying takes it to zero, which is the honest answer.
It cannot be gamed
The score counts distinct days you have actioned, never the number of changes you made. Toggling one day back and forth twenty times moves nothing.
There is an automated test that does exactly that — twenty-one changes to a single day — and fails if the score budges.
The honest limit
The strongest possible signal would be whether a day you marked free actually turned into work. That needs booking history the platform does not have yet, so it is not calculated and not pretended. Every availability change is recorded, so it can be added later against real history rather than guessed at now.