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Create a shared digital calendar with significant people in your life

This Practical Betterment will seem incredibly obvious to many of you, but to me it is a revelation. Although the ability to have a shared calendar has been around since the early days of the internet, it's only in the last week that it occurred to me to set one up with my partner. It has already become one of the most practical betterments.

Instead of asking over and over again if she is working tomorrow. I just consult her very organised calendar — and when she wants to check if I'm free she looks at my very empty calendar.

Two people sharing digital calendars with each other has the effect of combining two calendars together. Digital calendars make this easy work — removing the difficult tasks of manually copying events and merging calendar artworks into a thematically consistent hybrids.

A goats in trees calendar combined with a monster truck calednar resulting in a calendar with an artwork of a giant goat crushing cars

How to share digital calendars

This differs depending on which calendar app you're using — if you both you the same app — then it will be trivially easy to do this.

How to share a google calendar

  1. Login to your Google Calendar in a web browser
  2. Select the calendar you wish to share
  3. Navigate to Settings
  4. Find the section labelled Share with specific people or groups
  5. Click Add people or groups
  6. A dialogue will open allowing you to search for contacts and send them an invitation to view your calendar.

How to share an Apple calendar

  1. On iOS open the Calendar app.
  2. Select Calendars.
  3. Choose which calendar you want to share and click the i icon. This will open up the Edit Calendar menu.
  4. Under the heading Shared with: click Add Person. This will open up a search for contacts.
  5. Search for the contact you want to share your calendar with and click Add.

How to share a Google Calendar with Apple and vice versa

We use different operating systems and so sharing calendars between Google and Apple turned out to be a problem.

You can't share an Apple calendar with Google, but you can share a Google Calendar with Apple. So to do this the Apple user will need a Google account.

In the settings for the Apple Calendar app you can add a Google account. This will allow you to view and edit your Google Calendar in the MacOS and iOS native apps.

To share calendars you'll need to login into Google calendar and do so in the normal way.

However, to view a shared Google calendar in the native Apple Calendar app you need to

  1. Visit Google Calendar Sync Settings page
  2. Tick the boxes for the shared calendars you'd like to sync
  3. Click Save
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