What “next opening” means
The date on your Beacon is an estimate of when your workload drops back under your own availability threshold - and it is your calendar date, shown to everyone exactly as you would read it.
It has three possible answers, not one
Candid Beacon does not always name a date, because it is not always honest to name one. The next-opening line resolves to one of three things:
| What your Beacon says | What it means |
|---|---|
| Available now | Your load is already at or below your availability threshold, and you are not inside a block of time off that covers the whole day. |
| Next opening: 3 Sep 2026 | Enough work is due to finish by that date for your load to drop back under your threshold. |
| Fully booked - no opening in the coming weeks | No date inside your planning horizon would bring you back under the threshold. Naming a date beyond the horizon would be a guess, so no date is named. |
The last one is the case worth understanding. An estimate that ran past the end of the window you actually plan over would be arithmetic dressed up as a promise, so it degrades to a plain statement instead.
How the date is found
Candid Beacon walks forward through the due dates of your active jobs, removing each job’s remaining load as its due date passes, and stops at the first date after which what is left fits under your availability threshold. The opening is the day after that job is due.
Two rules refine it:
- Full time off pushes it. If the date it lands on sits inside a block that removes 100% of your capacity - a holiday, sickness, a public holiday - the opening moves to the day after that block ends. You are not available inside your own leave, even at zero load. Partial blocks, like focus time, leave real availability and so do not move the date.
- The planning horizon bounds it. An opening that would fall beyond your horizon becomes “fully booked” rather than a distant date.
The threshold here is your availability threshold, not the Available / Busy / Full bands. Those bands are fixed - under 50% is Available, 50 to 79% is Busy, 80% and over is Full - and they are the same for every account. Your availability threshold is your own setting, and it is the only one this date is measured against. They can disagree, and when they do, both are telling the truth about different questions.
It is your date, and it is not converted
This is the part most worth reading, because it is the part most people expect to work the other way.
A next-opening date is a date, not a moment, and it describes your availability. If you are free from 12 March, you are free from 12 March - that is a fact about your calendar, not about any instant in time. So the date is not converted into the reader’s timezone: every visitor sees the same date, and the date they see is yours.
Converting it would make the page state something untrue. A conversion would first have to invent a time of day for a date that has none, then shift it - so a reader far enough west of you would be shown the day before, a date on which you are not free. The conversion would manufacture a falsehood out of a fact that had no ambiguity in it to begin with.
Nor does the page name your timezone beside the date. Naming a zone on a value that has no time of day invites the reader to think a conversion is needed, which is the confusion this is meant to remove - and it would put your approximate location on a public page.
So the date is written in a long form that cannot be misread - “3 Sep 2026”, never 03/09/2026, which is two different dates in two different countries. Alongside it, invisibly, sits an exact machine-readable value, so a crawler, a screen reader or an assistant reading your Beacon gets the same date you meant rather than having to guess at the format.
The developer-facing version of this, including the exact markup, is on Dates and timezones.
When the date changes
Your Beacon shows the estimate from the last snapshot you published, not a live reading. Adding, editing or finishing a job changes the estimate in the app immediately; it reaches your Beacon when a snapshot is published - by you pressing Update Beacon, or by one of the automation switches doing it for you. See Republish automatically.