In most calendar applications, it's possible to create multiple calendars. Perhaps you only use the default calendar and would like to know why it would be useful to have multiple calendars. In this article, I will give my take on why you should use more than one calendar.

Types of calendars

I have a calendar for when the garbage container should put on the side of the street. The dates are available in advance for the year. I add these dates to a specific calendar for these events.

Another calendar I have is a calendar called Environment. This calendar contains events that I need to know about, but don't have to act on directly.

Show or hide the calendar

When you have a calendar for a specific type of event, it's easier to show or hide the calendar. The garbage calendar events don't have much influence on me planning my day. So it's useful that I can hide this calendar. If my default calendar also contains these events, it would be impossible to hide them.

Default settings for notifications

The garbage calendar has specific default settings for notifications. The evening before the collection at 8 pm, I get notified that I need to take the garbage out.

The other example is for events where you don't want notifications. The Environment calendar should not notify me. The default setting makes it easier to create events.

Default settings for free and busy

When you create a new calendar, determine if you need the events on the calendar to be free or busy. When you have an Environment calendar, you should put the events to free by default. But perhaps the calendar from an event scheduling app should be set to busy.

Default settings for public and private

When you have a calendar with public events and sometimes want to keep some events private, you could create a second calendar for events that are private by default. These events can show up as busy moments in your schedule but would not be visible to other people.

Sharing with other people

When you invite people to events, you share it with them. When you want to share more events, you can also share the whole calendar. It may be useful in a long-lived group, and you have repeating events and don't need to know who will attend.

An example of this is when you are part of a team. We have multiple events in a week that we have on the calendar. Without the shared calendar, someone would need to invite you to these events. A better way is to create a calendar and add the team events to that calendar. Every team member can take a look at the events and know exactly when to be there.

Sharing with apps

The problem with apps is that you do not always know what kinds of events these apps create on your calendar. Because of that, it can be better to create a new calendar and let the app create events in that calendar. Examples of apps that update your calendar are Todoist and RescueTime.

For importing many events

To create many events, you can create a recurring event. Recurring events can't help you when these events don't repeat. When you want to number the meetings or have different titles, you also won't be able to do it.

A solution would be to create a file and import it. However, when we import a file, this can give the wrong result. With the import, we add many events to the calendar at once. When these events are not right, it can be almost impossible to remove those events from the calendar in most calendar apps. The problem becomes worse when we mixed events with your other events.

To solve this, you first create a new calendar and then import these events to that calendar. When the result is different from what you expect, you can remove the whole calendar and try again.

Conclusion

With multiple calendars, you have more control over your events. You can set the default settings and share, import and remove these calendars more easily. Multiple calendars are a great to use for increasing your productivity.