Building automation that keeps client communication perfectly timed

Working with clients across different countries comes with a simple but important challenge: knowing when not to reach out.

At rtCamp, we work with clients across seven countries, and part of that relationship means respecting their local holidays.

Previously, PMs would regularly open Google Calendar, check the holiday calendar for each client’s country, and jot down upcoming dates. Different time zones made it easy to miss a holiday and reach out at the wrong time.

We wanted to remove that manual effort, so we built an automated workflow using n8n, connecting it to Google Calendar and Slack.

From manual calendar checks to an automated system

Google Calendar already provides public holiday calendars for different countries. We selected the calendars relevant to our clients across the US, Canada, United Kingdom, India, Australia, New Zealand, and Austria.

But having the information available wasn’t enough. The challenge was to get the right information to the right people at the right time.

That is where n8n came in. The workflow connects to Google Calendar, pulls holiday events from every country we work with, merges them into a single dataset, and works through several steps to turn that raw data into a clean, useful Slack message.

The workflow, step by step:

1. Schedule Trigger fires the workflow at a set interval.
2. Google Calendar node fetches holiday events from every tracked country’s calendar, including Austria, New Zealand, India, Canada, US, and the rest, then merges them into a single dataset covering both public and observance holidays.
3. Code node (JavaScript) cleans and structures that merged data: event name, holiday type (public or observance), country flag, and date.
4. The structured data gets pushed into a Google Sheet, which acts as the workflow’s working dataset for that run.
5. A filter step in Google Sheets keeps only public holidays and leaves out observance holidays, so notifications stay focused on the days that actually matter for outreach.
6. A second code node builds the Slack message dynamically, turning the filtered holidays into a clean, table-style layout using Slack’s Block Kit.
7. A conditional check decides what happens next: if there’s a holiday to report, the workflow sends the message to Slack, if there’s none for that run, it skips sending anything.
8. The sheet clears out automatically, ready for the next run.

The workflow handles the repetitive work automatically, so PMs are free to focus on their clients instead of their calendars.

Designing Slack notifications people “actually” read

We could have simply piped calendar alerts straight into Slack. That would have added one more notification for people to scroll past.

Instead, we designed the messages to be clear and easy to scan, showing the country, holiday, and date in a structured format.

We built the notifications around two specific moments.

A weekly holiday overview

Every Monday, the team receives a summary of the public holidays coming up in the current month. This helps PMs plan ahead by focusing only on holidays that haven’t occurred yet.

A timely reminder

The workflow also sends a reminder before an upcoming holiday, and another on the day itself. So if a client has a holiday coming up, the team gets a simple heads-up: pause outreach to this client today. No calendar hunting. No relying on memory.

The result: Around 20 hours saved every month

The biggest benefit has been removing a recurring manual task from project management.

Here’s the math behind that number. Each PM was spending roughly 20 to 25 minutes a week manually checking regional calendars and cross-referencing them against active clients, close to an hour and a half a month per person. Across our team of 12 to 15 project managers juggling clients in multiple countries, that manual effort added up to close to 20 hours a month. That’s exactly the time the automation now gives back.

Beyond the hours, everyone now works from the same information. PMs no longer need to remember which calendar to check, and the chance of reaching out to a client on their holiday drops sharply. The automation also gives us a consistent process that works across countries and clients.

Automation is part of ‘how we work’

This workflow started as an internal fix, but the pattern behind it reflects a broader practice at rtCamp. We look for repetitive tasks that teams have accepted as part of their routine work and find ways to automate them using the tools they already have.

You don’t need complex AI to start automating. In this case, Google Calendar already had the data, Slack was already where our teams communicated, and n8n connected the two and handled the workflow in between.

If a similar pattern is hiding in your team’s daily operations, it’s probably costing more time than anyone has measured. Get in touch with rtCamp, and let’s talk about what a fix like this could look like for your team.