I am curious on everyone’s calendar organization. The assumption is you have either multiple calendars or multiple accounts (hats). I am looking to simplify but looking to see is it worth changing my workflow.
I’ll use myself to explain.
As far as “Google Accounts” go to:
Personal Google - contains calendars of personal, family shared, birthdays, homeschool (4)
Parish Google - contains main parish calendar (all services, etc) (1)
Activity Google - contains main activity calendar (our gym youth facility) (1)
Organization 1 - calendar displays (our release schedule) not heavily used tbh
Organization 2 - calendar displays responsibilities of services (i.e. who’s responsible for morning vs evening service, etc)
Organization 3 - calendar (not used yet) new school organization, eventually display those responsibilities.
I am managing everything through Fantastical so far and using Calendar sets. Sometimes I wonder if the workflow is correct.
Workflow - Each account is listed under Fantastical and I just adjust the calendar sets.
Proposed - What if…
I remove all the Google Accounts from Fantastical, just keep my main personal.
Share the calendars from those other accounts to main personal
What do I lose by doing it this way?
Does anyone do anything different? Or better advice?
I don’t have any advice Your set up is similar to mine (I use BusyCal but it has the same functions).
I have done one seemingly daft thing that turns out to be helpful and which I will miss if I stop using a third party calendar app:
I’m using two calendar apps in parallel: BusyCal and iCal. The two apps have the same calendars in them, but in BusyCal some of the calendars are turned off. BusyCal is actually where I run my life. I have the view set up exactly how I like and I rarely change it.
iCal’s job is to show ALL calendars. That view doesn’t change either.
Why do I do this? There is a method to my madness. I have my employer’s HR calendar for everyone’s holidays, and a couple of calendars for important colleagues. I don’t want to see them in BusyCal, but I wanted a really quick way to check them when needed. I know that’s what Calendar sets are for, but I just found having a separate app for it to be really useful. Both calendars are next to each other in my dock, and I don’t have to worry about opening BusyCal and it being on the wrong view.
I suppose really the way to think of it is that in my setup iCal is for reference and BusyCal is for action.
I like the two app idea. That works for me as well—something about knowing one of the apps will never be on the wrong calendar set when I switch to it.
As for merging all those other organizations’ calendars into one, what would you be trying to solve? What’s not working about your current calendar sets? Is there a way to completely offload your responsibility to manage/view any of those calendars?
Not sure if there’s an actual problem to solve. Sometimes because of the information overload, it’s difficult to schedule/see times.
Example:
My Parish Calendar where I organize all the services and meetings of the parish. Is usually fully stacked daily. Our Gym Youth Center is also fully stacked.
There’s a lot of jumping back and forth between my personal calendar set and the “work” calendar set to make sure where I need to be at, etc. Factor in the other calendars, the only way I have been able to make sense is the usage of Fantastical Calendar sets.
But also, my mind this month has been in “audit” mode. i.e. Do I really need this subscription, this software, this service? Is this workflow still beneficial or I am doing it because it’s what I am accustomed? Is there a more efficient way of doing this.
Example of efficiency
Due to fear/paranoia of losing photos on my phone, whether something happens to the phone, or some iCloud outage. Every few months I would manually make a copy of photos from my phone to my NAS. Then this month it dawned on me…why not use the Synology Photos app and have it upload to a designated folder. It will be automatic and a 2nd backup in case iCloud crashes. Eventually whether it was manual or automatic, all the photos eventually become archived on Synology Photos. This change in workflow saved me time and reduced stress.
Your set up is similar to mine (I use BusyCal but it has the same functions).