Simplifying your double (calendar) life

If like me you live a double life (pro and personal) and like me you want to share your availability via calendars, you probably have created clones of the same event into multiple calendars. There is a better way.

Double life

I live double calendar lives.

A shared calendar tells where I am (travel, conferences, face to face meetings, holidays etc) to the team I work with. Except that I am in more than one team, so there are several of these shared calendars. Likewise, my spouse likes to know when I am out of town (or rather does not like to know). And I end up creating one event in my main calendar and one event per shared calendar.

There are many occasions where an event is duplicated for one reason or another.

Invite instead of duplicate

Max shared a pretty useful tip with me the other day. Instead of duplicating an event in each calendar, you can invite shared calendars to a single event.

Google assigns email addresses to each shared calendar. You can find this email by selecting Calendar settings on the right menu of a given calendar (down arrow). Under Calendar address, you will find an email that looks like this cds7678dscdcs876sc6784@@group.calendar.google.com. Also make sure that the calendar setting Auto-accept invitations is set to Automatically add all invitations to this calendar. After all it will need to accept invites to your parties :)

Add to your contacts an entry with the email address (it’s easier to remember than this opaque email address). And next time you need to put an event into multiple calendars, simply invite this/these contact(s) to the event. And voilà!