How to share a team calendar

The reliable way to share team schedules is to create a separate calendar for the shared thing — holidays, releases, on-call, client meetings — and give the team access to that calendar, rather than sharing personal calendars with each other. Personal calendars stay personal; the shared one carries what the team needs to see.

This also solves the visibility problem: colleagues can see that you are busy without seeing what you are doing, which is what most people want from a work calendar.

The steps

1. Decide what the calendar is for. One purpose per calendar — mixing releases and birthdays makes both harder to read.
2. Create the calendar and give it a name that says what it holds, not who made it.
3. Choose a colour that distinguishes it at a glance from personal events.
4. Share it with the team and set the access level: view for most people, edit for the few who maintain it.
5. Add the recurring events first — the weekly meeting, the release day, the holidays.
6. Agree one convention for event titles, so a glance is enough: “Release 3.4”, not “Alex — stuff”.
7. Review it once a quarter and delete calendars nobody opens.

Access levels

• View free/busy — colleagues see when you are unavailable, not what the event is. The right default for personal calendars.
• View details — full event information. Appropriate for shared team calendars.
• Edit — can add and change events. Keep this list short; a calendar everyone can edit becomes a calendar nobody trusts.

Do not put confidential information in event titles on a shared calendar. Titles are the part everyone sees, including people who were added later and forgotten about.

Keeping it readable

• One calendar per purpose, each with its own colour.
• Recurring events for anything predictable — a repeating series beats twelve one-off entries.
• Consistent naming, so the calendar can be scanned rather than read.
• An owner for each shared calendar. Unowned calendars drift out of date within a quarter.

Doing it in Ettex

Ettex Calendar gives you month, week, day and list views, coloured calendars and reminders, with events sitting next to the documents and boards they relate to — so a release event can link to the checklist instead of describing it.