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. Leave and cover come from the same source, so keep it consistent with absence management rather than maintaining two truths.

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 Unowned calendars drift out of date within a quarter.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.