Learn English – Scheduling a phone call: how to express the available slots

sentence-construction

In a business scene, we often need to deal with something more complex than some of introductory "business English" texts.
More often than not, it isn't as simple as

John: Would Tuesday suit you?
Paul: That's fine with me. Thank you.
John: Thank you. Talk to you then.

For example, suppose I'm arranging a phone call with someone outside our company, possibly in another continent. I have to tell (perhaps via email) when I'll be available for a call and the condition can easily be as complex as:

  1. It's Wednesday afternoon right now here in Tokyo.
  2. I'll be available for a phone call for the rest of this week and the next week. (I'm not sure about my schedule for the week after next.)
  3. I'll be available only after 1pm every day.
  4. Except, I'll be only available after 3pm this Friday and before 5pm on Tuesday next week.

How do native speaker write for this?
In case we use email for arrangement, a single, long and detailed email is preferred over exchanging short ones over and over again.

Update

Native speakers never bother to use a bullet list like the above for arranging a call in a business scene, for good or bad. I'd like to know "plain English" to express the same thing. I don't need comments like "But bullet lists can actually be better than 'plain English'…"

Best Answer

Unless it's absolutely imperative that they know your every available hour, I would just trim it up a bit:

Call me anytime in the next two weeks after 1pm Tokyo time, except Tuesday or Friday.

It's not as accurate but it's simple and probably gives them more than enough options on when to call you. If you really need them to understand the full extent of your availability (perhaps because it is very important that you be available to be called at all times) then I really would consider a bulleted list:

Here's my availability for the next two weeks:

  • This Friday after 3pm.
  • Prior to 5pm next Tuesday.
  • Any other day after 1pm.

If I was speaking this to them on the phone, it would sound a lot like me reading that quote as-is.

You could also write it as a sentence:

Here's my availability for the next two weeks: this Friday after 3pm; prior to 5pm next Tuesday; any other day after 1pm.

Could also use commas instead of semicolons but I believe it's appropriate to use semicolons as a sort of "super comma" when the things you are separating are complex. This is probably what you are looking for, in fact. The semicolon is basically the bullet point of a single sentence. See: here (funny comic about semicolons).

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