You know how it is: your main calendar is jam-packed. Work visits, dentist appointments, child 1's swimming lesson (which (of course) doesn't match child 2's), and that one much-needed reminder to water the plants every week. All those colored blocks compete for attention. The result? An unreadable mess. This is where a secondary calendar might just save you...
By default, every Google user gets one primary calendar linked to their email address. A secondary calendar is simply an additional calendar that you or someone else creates within your account. Think of it as an extra layer over your main calendar. You might already be familiar with this, because perhaps your office has a leave calendar, a birthday calendar, or a shared system for booking shared cars, for example!
What can you do with it?
- Divide and conquer: Create a separate calendar for your 'Social Media Planning,' 'Workout Schedule,' or 'Renovation'. This way, you can keep your work and personal life strictly separate, or you can differentiate by client, location, priority, etc. Think of it as a kind of "filter" in your planning.
- Share with specific people: You can share a secondary calendar with your partner, a colleague or even externally, without them having direct access to your full private calendar.
- Toggle on and off for focus: With a single click, you can deselect the "Children's Schedule" when you're at work, so you only see what needs to be done professionally that day. You can also assign specific colors to the calendars. Pro tip: Use soft colors for "background information" (like the holiday calendar) and brighter colors for your hard deadlines.
- Create public calendars: Organizing a sporting event with a training schedule for the months leading up to it? You can make a secondary calendar public so others can subscribe to it.
- Open specific times for bookings: You share the link of your booking page in the secondary calendar, and people can only book an appointment at those specific times.
Is this the same as booking a room or resource?
Not as such. If you want to book a meeting room, you don't necessarily create a secondary calendar for it, but you can use Google's Resources. This ensures that a room can never be double-booked. The same applies to so-called "assets" such as shared cars, bicycles, or equipment.
You can, however, create a secondary calendar that collects all reservations for the "Shared Car." This way, everyone on the team can see when the car is available, without needing to have permission to manage the car themselves!
What can't you do with it?
As with everything in life, there are some (minimal) limitations, which we would like to mention for the sake of completeness:
- No "Busy" status for others: When someone checks your availability on Google Calendar using the "Find a Time" feature, the system often only sees appointments in your primary calendar. Appointments in your secondary calendar are usually not automatically marked as "busy" for your colleagues.
- Receiving invitations: When someone invites you to an event using your email address, it always appears in your primary calendar by default. You can't set a secondary calendar as your "main" address for new invitations.
- There can only be one owner: You have to be careful when deleting a user, because the calendars they owned will also be deleted. Fortunately, you can prevent this by first changing the owner of the calendar before deleting the user!
Some examples?
- "Content Calendar": Use it to schedule blog posts, videos, or newsletters to go live, and share this specific calendar with your copywriter, printer, or graphic designer. They'll see exactly when the deadlines are, without needing to know you're also visiting the gynecologist that afternoon.
- "Focus Blocks": Prefer not to use Google Calendar's "focus time" feature because you still want to be flexible with colleagues? Then color your day with blocks like "Administration" or "Strategy." By doing this in a secondary calendar, you can hide all those blocks with a single click to see what actual appointments (with other people) are scheduled that day, and they can see your actual availability when looking for a shared meeting time. This prevents visual chaos.
- "On call schedule": Do you receive your individual work schedule every quarter and prefer to import it automatically (instead of manually copying everything, which can lead to errors!), but you don't want to lose track of your other appointments? Because secondary calendars also have their own iCal link, you can easily import this schedule with just a few clicks.
We believe a secondary calendar is the perfect tool for structure and clarity. Want to visually organize your schedule and share specific information with others? Give it a try!
