Calendars Consolidation?

How many calendars does everyone have?
How do you manage them?

I am involved in many projects and services each one has a calendar.
It’s easy to climb to 15-20 calendars. I know you can manage the “view”, but I don’t want to have to remember to change the view each day.

Suggestions?

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I love calendar groups in Fantastical on the Mac. Unfortunately no app has this feature on iOS so I have multiple calendar apps for the views I’m consistently in, and a few Shortcuts to pull up other info I need less regularly (I tend not to look at my parents calendars - so those are only in a Shortcut).

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Thank you for the reply @RosemaryOrchard! Which apps do you recommend? I only use Fantastical, if only there was a way to have multiple instances of it!!

I have Calendar, Calzones (as my podcast cohosts are in different timezones I use this for podcasting!), Calendars and Calendars 5 by Readdle (I’m not sure what the difference is there!). Those work fine for me.

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I subscribe to a handful of other groups’ project calendars (definitely not 15-20!), and I normally keep them clicked off. I periodically click them on to check on them, and if there’s something I want to attend/do, I’ll copy individual events to an always-on personal calendar under my control. This way I have only one calendar app I need to use, all subscribed calendars are just a click away, and I am able to weed out and focus on the items most important to me.

The only downside - especially if you’ve got a ton of outside calendars to which you’re subscribed - is that you need to regularly sit down and look at each subscribed calendar and spend the time to copy/paste those events you want to always have in your main view.

Fr. Michael,

I run everything through Fantastical. I have the Parish calendar, my liturgical assignments, work, medical, employee calendars, project calendars (this is actually OmniFocus), and other calendars as needed. As I described in my workflows episode, I’ve taken to modifying my workflow to match the applications I use instead of trying to have the apps match my workflow. So, I will change view as needed, turn certain groups of calendars on or off based on need, have recourse to the taskbar app for quick views.

Irrespective of what I’ve said above, I recently did something that helped my calendar management more than anything I’ve ever done or app I’ve used. I really took the time to think through which calendars I needed to see on each device. I previously had everything showing on every device. Now, I only have certain calendars on for my watch, unique ones for my iOS devices, and also specific ones associated with Alexa. Only my iMac has all (almost all) of my calendars showing at all times. This diverse calendar configuration across all the different devices that I use for different parts of my day has really streamlined the way I manage time and my calendars for the better.

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Can you direct me to your workflow episode? thank you

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@Yaakov it’s in my profile. I don’t remember what number it is off of the top of my head.

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Thank you & hope you are having a relaxing weekend :slight_smile:

I have a question, is there a way for a repeating event to change all the information automatically? For example if I change the name? Or the time or something is there an easy way of doing it instead of it asking me to save for the current event or future events??

In implementing “time-blocking” (MacSparky’s “hyper-scheduling”), I’ve found that I really need to separate my “events & appointments view” from the view of all my scheduled blocks of time for working on various projects. For this, having multiple calendars helps. I’ve set up 6 extra calendars (in iCloud, like my other calendars) – one for each of my Areas of Responsibility. When I schedule a block of time, I use the calendar that corresponds to the relevant area I intend to focus on for that bloc (in my case, as an academic: teaching, research, professional service, departmental admin, personal, etc). Because each of the calendars has a distinctive color, the blocks of time do too, which is visually helpful. (BTW: I use the same colors (and a three-letter acronym) for other domains that fall into different Areas of Responsibility, like Finder tags, OmniFocus perspectives, appointment calendars, etc).

But I don’t always want all these time blocks to be visible. Sometimes, I just want to see the “hard landscape,” like when I’m scheduling appointments. Also, if I’m meeting with someone and open Fantastical to make an appointment, I’m not always interested in a conversation about hyper-scheduling… :wink:

To solve this, I use Fantastical and Apple’s Calendar app in parallel, with split screens on either the iPad or the iMac. In a narrower window on the left, I have Calendar in “Day” view, showing all the planning calendars (as well as my appointments). On the right, I have Fantastical, showing the full week or month, but usually only with the Calendar Set that I call “Default Mode”. I say “usually,” because, in Fantastical, I do have a Calendar Set called “Planning Calendars”, where all the calendars for time blocks are visible, just because Fantastical is easier to work with. Once I’ve got the timeblocks set – once a week, with some adjustments each evening – I switch Fantastical back into a “Default Mode”, and then the time blocks are visible only in the Calendar app on the left.

Bonus tip: each time block in the planning calendar contains a link to the corresponding custom perspective in OmniFocus. (For example, my calendar for time blocks devoted to teaching and student supervision is call “TCH Planning”, and has a link to an OmniFocus perspective call “TCHf” which shows me all available actions from projects in the “Teaching” folder that are flagged or due soon).

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