Cross-calendar blocking events

BusyCal supports creating time-blocking events across multiple calendars to help manage your availability seamlessly.

Need to ensure your personal commitments don’t clash with work meetings? BusyCal’s "Block event on Calendar" feature (introduced in v2024.3.4) allows you to manage your availability effortlessly. For example, if you have a family gathering on your personal calendar, you can block that time on your work calendar, indicating to your colleagues that you’re busy without sharing personal details.

BusyCal ensures that time-blocked events stay in sync with the original event. Whenever you update the date, title, or details of the original event, these changes are automatically propagated to all associated blocking events. This works seamlessly across any calendar or account, ensuring that your availability is consistently managed and accurately reflected.

Block on Another Calendar

1. Select and Ctrl+click on any event.
2. Select a calendar from the "Block on calendar" sub-menu.
3. Choose how you want the event to appear:
   • Show as busy: This option will strip the original event's details (title, notes, location etc) and will simply state [Busy] as the title on the time-blocking event.
   • Include details: Alternatively, you can choose to copy the title and notes to the blocking event.

tip

When you select Show as Busy, the event in question is duplicated and stripped of all information. When using this feature on a shared calendar, rest assured the time-blocking event contains no information at all other than the date & time. No part of the notes, tags, location details or any other information is copied.

important

Blocking events are automatically updated with changes from the original event on the Mac where they were created. Manual changes to these events should be avoided, as they will be overwritten the next time the original event is updated.

Unblocking an Event

Unblocking is performed in the same manner by selecting the original event, then Ctrl+click > "Block on calendar" and select the same calendar. Alternatively, you can select a time-blocking event and press the delete key.

Suppressing Time-Blocking Notes

Time-blocking events help manage availability across calendars, but if you choose Show as Busy, you may later forget where the event originated. To prevent this, BusyCal automatically leaves a small note in place of the original:

Time-blocking event created by BusyCal

If you'd prefer not to include this note, you can disable it using the following Terminal command:

For Direct Download and App Store Users:

defaults write com.busymac.busycal3 suppressTimeBlockingNoteFooter -bool true

For Setapp Users:

defaults write com.busymac.busycal-setapp suppressTimeBlockingNoteFooter -bool true

After running the command, quit and restart BusyCal for the changes to take effect.