Calendar sync
Hold your time on both calendars.
Pair any two calendars you have connected and a masked placeholder holds the same hour on the other one. The coworker who can only see your work calendar stops booking over the dentist appointment on your personal calendar.
Keep your calendars in sync
On your personal calendar
Setting up a pair
Four decisions, then it runs on its own.
Connect more than one calendar.
Google, Outlook, as many accounts as you have. The pairing card appears in Settings once there are two calendars to pair.
Pick the two calendars.
Each one is listed with the account it belongs to, so two calendars both named Calendar stay easy to tell apart.
Choose which way availability flows.
Both ways is the default, and it is the usual choice for a work calendar and a personal one. Pick a single direction when your personal commitments should show up at work and nothing should travel back.
Then leave it alone.
A placeholder appears on the other calendar within a sync cycle of the real event being created. Move the event and the placeholder moves with it. Delete the event and the placeholder goes.
What the other calendar shows
A block of time and a masked title. Nothing else.
The point of a shared calendar is to answer one question, which is whether you are free. Everything past that answer is yours, so nothing past that answer crosses over.
Crosses over
- A block of held time
- A masked title you choose, such as Busy
Stays where it is
- The meeting title
- The description
- The attendees
- The conferencing link
- The location
You name the mask. Call it Busy, or Personal, or anything you would rather your colleagues read. Rename it later and Groupthink rewrites the placeholders that pair has already written.
What gets skipped
Your other calendar never gets busier than your life is.
Three kinds of event look like commitments and are not. Copying them would invent unavailability you never claimed, so Groupthink leaves them alone.
Events you marked Free
A Free event is a note to yourself, not a commitment you are asking other people to work around.
Invitations you declined
You said no. Holding the time anyway would take an hour off your week that you already gave back.
Placeholders another tool already wrote
Mirroring a mirror stacks blocks on top of blocks until neither calendar means anything.
Reversible
Turning a pair off cleans up after itself.
Switch a pair off, remove it, or disconnect one of its calendars, and the placeholders Groupthink wrote come off both calendars. You are never left with blocks nobody can explain, and your real events are never touched.
Quiet by design
Placeholders do not come back in as meetings.
Groupthink tags every placeholder it writes and skips its own tags when it reads your calendars. A held block never turns into a meeting, never creates a relationship, and never gets a notetaker sent to it.
Why this lives in a personal CRM
Your calendar is where most of your relationships get scheduled.
Groupthink keeps the record of the people you know and what matters to them. Most of the interactions that fill that record start as a block of time on a calendar, which is why keeping your calendars honest is part of the job rather than a utility bolted onto the side.
It is also what makes the times you hand out worth handing out. Your availability and booking links read every calendar you have connected, so the slot someone picks is a slot you can keep.
Pair your calendars in about a minute.
Free for 30 days. Connect a second calendar and pick a direction.
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