I’ve got my iCloud calendar for personal, a shared one with my wife as we both find it easier than inviting, and 3 work calendars on Outlook for meetings, lessons, other.
I have
- Home calendar shared with my wife
- Work calendar for general events related to my LLC
- A calendar synced from Outlook (CompanionLink) for all meetings scheduled by my client.
- A “monthly reporting” calendar into which I recap each day’s billable work – this is picked up by TimeTable 3 which spits out all the data I need at month end to create invoices.
I activate one or more of these reporting calendars depending on current contracts – one for each task order. So, because of that, I actually have dozens of calendars for work, but only a couple of them activated at any time.
Finally, I subscribe (via Hebcal) to calendars for holidays, weekly and daily readings.
I have one calendar and my wife has one calendar and we subscribe to each other’s calendar. Personally I dont understand the need for more than one (per person). The calendar is used to allocate my time resources. No matter how many roles I fill, I only have one instance of each hour of the day, so why have two or three calendars? I suppose that if you wanted to be able to “turn off” events associated with one role it would be useful, but don’t really have that need (I do turn off my wife’s calendar periodically so that I can focus on mine).
I do also subscribe a few other fixed calendars like birthdays, holidays, and my TripIt calendar (which hasn’t been getting any use lately).
I have … a lot:
These are shared between my wife and I on iCloud:
- Stephen
- Merri
- Stephen: Work
- Family Events
- Kid 1
- Kid 2
- Kid 3
Then, on Google, one for my public Relay address and one for my public 512 address. These are mostly just for accepting invites to meetings with others. I duplicate them to my iCloud work account so my wife can see if I’ll be on a call.
- Family Calendar (shared personal stuff)
- Personal calendar (not bothering anyone else)
- Business calendar (running my own business)
- Client calendar (provided by client)
- Subscribed to holidays, birthdays, Tripit and various events/sports calendars (run these in a separate personal calendar)
Make use of the calendar sets in Fantastical to optimise the views I need and cut the clutter. The “view all” regularly causes a panic attack, so the ability to selectively ignore stuff at certain times keeps me sane 
I used to have around 7 calendars but I’ve found cutting down has meant I have a better grip of my events. Now I have:
Personal
Work (managed by the office secretary)
Basecamp (for shared events with work colleagues)
Shared family
I migrated all the events from when I had multiple calendars while I was re-reading GTD. I wanted to make them in line with the methodology.
That’s it exactly for me. I use my iPad to relax, so my work calendars are off by default there as I don’t need to see my timetable. Everything is on on my phone though.
8 calendars for different areas of my life (but I use calendars to log a range of activity, not just appointments) and a couple of other company calendars for different roles I hold.
I really appreciate being able to look at my calendar app and get a quick sense of how things are balanced based on the distribution of different coloured blocks for a given week, but I’m probably going to consolidate some of those calendars now I’ve found a tag and stats set-up that’s actually easy to work with (WordBoard and Timeview). Also curious about Woven for that, but I’m happy with what I’ve got for now…
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Our family only has a few calendars. We used to have more we would share with extended family. For work, I have about 30 calendars added and Fantastical calendar sets are a lifesaver for viewing certain groups of those quickly. Really glad they fixed the performance issues at the launch of 3 so I can actually use it!
My wife and I each have calendars, and there is a calendar for activities involving both of us. These are shared. Before I retired I had a calendar for work (not shared) and another for my part-time teaching (not shared).
Wow didn’t think this many people would respond. It’s pretty cool to hear how other people use calendars. I just got a couple questions, if I have a shared calendar with someone and I change the name how come it’s not changing the name on the other person’s calendar? Second question is , I have a shared calendar with my wife, if she puts something on it , she will get an invite from me about it, and I get an alert she added something. But for some reason it’s inviting us for no reason at all cause it’s a shared calendar… anyone know how to fix this? I’m thinking of deleting it and redoing it. Anyone have suggestions? Thanks
Is it a true shared calendar or is it delegated access to an individual calendar?
Please explain your setup a bit more i.e. apps, accounts etc. as things work differently between Apple, Google and say Office 365
I am the keeper of the family calendars but I use 14 of them. I split it out so that I can track using TimeTable3 how much time I spend on certain types of task and on certain specific “customers”. So I have a calendar for each of the 2 organizations where I am an officer. One because I get credit off our water bill for all the time I spend doing my Treasurer duties and the other because now that I’m training several new people to do my job in the Sheep Assoc. I need to know how much time it really takes me to handle the workload. I track phone calls, work on LambTracker/AnimalTrakker, Desk work, farm work and so on in separate calendars. But I never get invites from my husband nor do I send any myself.
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More calendars just end up equalling more filters. Because I have so many oars in the water, that can really help. A silly example:
I have to record sometimes in what I call “Studio B” (my daughter’s bedroom) because my studio is now centrally located in the house. My daughter and I have a shared calendar that copies events from my various podcast calendars so she knows when I need to borrow her room.
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It should be a true shared calendar. We are using Apple iCloud. She has access to add and change anything she wants, it’s just when she adds something I get an alert and then I hit ok and she gets the same event she just sent me as an invite. It’s so bizarre.
Got to ask, are you sure she isn’t automatically inviting you through habit?
It’s possible but I don’t think so, at least maybe at first but not now. It’s just so odd, I’m going to make a new calendar and see if that could fix the problem.
Do you have 2 calendars (YOU/HER with x-delegation (access)) or 3 calendars (YOU only/HER only/ FAMILY)?
I have 3 and book anything shared in the FAMILY calendar, but do NOT invite participants (no need as both have access). Calendar entry prompt shows up for both, but no invites will be sent.
If you use the YOU calendar and than invite HER => invite will be sent (despite HER having access to YOU)
I have my personal calendar, she has her personal calendar. Neither of us has any access to each other Personal calendars(can’t view it, can’t do anything) This is where we will invite each other on this calendar for a doctor appointment or something else. Then we have a family kids shared calendar both have access, both can add/change stuff. So if she adds something I get an alert saying she added something (I want the alerts I like them) then I hit ok acknowledging the alert, then some how it sends her an invite for the same event she sent to me. Then she deleted an appointment the other day in the family kids calendar but it never removed it from my calendar. And I also don’t understand if I change the name of our shared family calendar, is it supposed to change the name of the shared calendar on her end also? Cause now i change the name but it’s not changing the name on hers. I set a new calendar up before and forgot to test it out cause I got busy before. Hopefully the new calendar will fix it all.
I have too many calendars. I have a personal one and a family one, although I’ve yet to convince my wife to use that — she’s still using a paper diary despite the occasions where one or other of us stuff up and have to reschedule something. Sigh.
I also have multiple work calendars and unfortunately I can only get a holistic view of my life in Outlook thanks to oppressive policies from work.
I also have my history calendar.