How to include personal busy/free in work google calendar?

May 1, 2016 8:11 AM

How can I make my personal and work google calendars play nice together? I'd like to avoid having work meetings scheduled when I have personal commitments with a minimum of effort.

I have a personal google calendar as well as a work one. It's easy enough to share my personal one with my work account so I can see them together, but it doesn't include my personal events in the work calendar's view of my busy/free availability. So, when people try to schedule meetings with me, they won't be aware that I may be busy at a given time due to a personal commitment.

The solution I'm currently using is to invite my work account to the events in my personal calendar that occur during work time. However, that has a number of drawbacks:

• I have to remember to send invites from my personal calendar
• I have to accept the invites from my work calendar
• Since I share my work calendar back to my personal one, all the personal events during work time show up twice

What I'd really like is an option to just include the shared personal calendar's busy/free availability in the work calendar's idea of busy/free, but I don't see any way to do that. Is there a way? What else might be an easier approach?

posted by Cogito to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Can you just use your work calender for everything? It's what I've seen done. You can set events to private and then only you see that's your dentist appointment or lunch date with a friend. This works well if you can login from your cell or home to add and view things. Two calenders are annoying. I actually use a paper date keeper but I know that won't work for many workplaces.
posted by Kalmya at 8:50 AM on May 1, 2016 [6 favorites]

Yeah, back in my office days I would just throw everything in my work calendar, either set to private or just blocked off.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 9:03 AM on May 1, 2016

You should be able to share or subscribe to one calendar from the other, e.g. to see your personal events on your work calendar but they would remain private because nobody else would have permission to view anything. This would (should) make your personal events viewable and not duplicated. You shouldn't need to invite your work calendar to anything.
posted by eatcake at 9:10 AM on May 1, 2016

Response by poster: Kalmya, feckless fecal fear mongering: I already have a lot of stuff in my personal calendar and that's where I receive invites for personal things, so I don't want to just use the work calendar for everything. I also feel strongly about keeping the storage of the two separate.

eatcake: that's what I already do. But subscribing to my personal calendar at work doesn't put those personal events in my busy/free availability info that people see when trying to schedule meetings with me.
posted by Cogito at 9:35 AM on May 1, 2016

Can you set up something via IFTTT? If [appointment in personal calendar] then [add generic appointment to work calendar]
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 9:40 AM on May 1, 2016

Unfortunately, that IFTTT recipe linked by scrittore won't work anymore, because Google discontinued XML feeds for Google Calendars last year.
posted by brianogilvie at 11:36 AM on May 1, 2016