Our support team can sometimes adjust polling times on the backend if needed, but it may be worthing noting that you’d still be using the same number of tasks a month regardless of the polling interval because the same number of actions are going to be performed in response to each trigger item. 

If you write in to the support team with your use-case, however, we can look into increasing that limit if needed: https://zapier.com/app/get-help

Thanks, ​@Mary K, but I don’t think that’s quite correct.  Unless I miss my guess, I was using a task every 2min to poll each calendar to detect changes.  What I need is maybe 2 or 3x per day based on the velocity of my calendar.  Can that polling period be lengthened that much, or is there another tool I can use?

Hi there ​@smackafee 

Can I ask why you’re looking to limit the polling of the Zap to only 2 or 3 times a day—is it that the calendar events are updated later in the day and so when the Zap initially triggers on them there’s missing information that hasn’t been added yet? 

If so, perhaps you could add a Delay For (Delay by Zapier) action to the Zap and set it to delay the Zap from running for a number of hours (however many you think is needed for the rest of the information to be added to the event). Then use a Find Calendar Event (Microsoft Outlook) search action to look for the event that triggered the Zap and pull it’s current details which would then allow the Zap to see any missing information that was since added.

You can learn more about using delays and search actions here: 

• Add delays to Zaps
• Search for existing data in Zaps

Do you think that approach would work or is there a different reason you’d like the polling time increased?

Well, the problem is usage.  If the check runs every two minutes, I’ll run out of tasks very quickly:

I understand that the new or modified events will trigger action no matter what, but I believe that these tasks counted against my total for the month, instead of being, say 3x daily for 30 days = 90 plus tasks for each meeting (even if there are two a day, that’s what another 60-120) well below my limit.  I think in the above situation this ran for less than a week until I saw the numbers.

Thanks for clarifying that, ​@smackafee. Hmm, I’m wondering if you might have accidentally created a “Zap Loop”, as that might explain why the Zap is using up tasks quicker than expected—our Zap is stuck in a loop guide explains Zap loops in a bit more detail. 

Can you share a screenshot showing the trigger and actions in the Zap so we can see if that might be the case? 

If it is a Zap loop that caused the unexpected task usage here I’d also recommend reaching out to our Support team to see if they’re able to help restore the tasks that were used unexpectedly.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Pretty sure it’s not a zap loop:

It’s just that the interval of 15min means it uses tasks every 15 minutes, obviously.  I’m really just looking for some way to run a zap maybe 3 times daily.

Thanks so much for sharing that helpful screenshot ​@smackafee! 

Hmm, with that type of Zap if you created only 1 new calendar event today and the Zaps polling interval was 15 mins, then today day it would only trigger once and only 1 task would be used. A Zap that uses a polling trigger like that will only trigger if it finds new information so if you don’t create any new events in Microsoft Outlook then it won’t trigger the Zap regardless of how many times it might “poll” to look for new events.

Is the Google Calendar where the event is being copied to synced with the Outlook calendar at all? Just wondering if the Google Calendar events the Zap created might then be ‘seen’ as a new Microsoft Outlook event, causing the Zap to trigger and make another event which then triggers the Zap and so on.

If it’s not, do you by any chance have any other Zaps that might be triggering from new events created in Google Calendar that then create a new event in Microsoft Outlook? If so, that Zap might be what’s causing this Zap to trigger too much. Do you think that could be the case? 

No other zaps are in play here, no.

As for the zaps-triggering-zaps thing, I guess maybe, but it didn’t over-replicate the items, so I suspect that even if the action were triggered three times, it still would have only used tasks to flesh out each.

ex. new event in Outlook means task used to create in GCal triggers the other zap (for bidirectional sync) to attempt to create in Outlook would then have detected the Outlook meeting exists and aborted.

Since neither overflowed meetings on each calendar, I think it works as intended.  

But the usage for that short period in October in the above screenie shows that I used almost my whole monthly allotment in a few days.

Thanks for confirming that ​@smackafee. The only other thing I can think of is if the events that are added are recurring events and that’s causing the Zap to trigger on every recurrence of the event.

That said, I think your best bet here would be to contact to our Support team to have the cause of the unexpected task usage investigated further. They’ll be able to dig into the logs for the Zap to determine if there’s a bug or some other reason as to why the Zap triggered so frequently.

Keen to ensure this gets sorted—please keep us updated on what they find!

Thanks.  I think I may have inadvertently solved the problem by adjusting what was happening.  I was seeing extra events being replicated in two hour increments, which was very odd.  I thought maybe it was a time zone error, but I also realized that I could prepend some text on each directional creation, meaning put a “Outlook:” at the front of the events created on GCal and “GCal:” going the other way.  Using a Filter zap on the check/update for the respective calendar to exclude the prepended events cleaned that up.  I think, because it’s also not replicating anything by accident, my task usage is down.  I still think there was something else going on, but with the 15-min polling interval and the Filter step solved my issue.

Wow! Thank you for confirming that your resolution got the Zap running. This will significantly help our Community members to have as a reference for the same issue.