Showing one client only the part of your calendar that concerns them
5-minute read
You have one calendar, because one calendar is how a life works. But the person asking for your availability only has business with a tenth of it — and you would rather not hand over the other nine.
A referee wants an assignor to see which Saturdays are open for matches, not the christening. A contractor wants one client to see the days booked for their project, not the other clients’ names. A tutor, a photographer, a locum, a translator: same shape every time. Some slice of your week is theirs, and the rest is emphatically not.
Tag what is theirs, mirror only that
Put a tag in the notes of the events that concern them, and give the mirror a rule that copies only tagged events. Everything else in your calendar stays where it is. The destination is a calendar you share with that one person, and it fills up with exactly the blocks they are entitled to see.
The setup
- Pick a tag. A hash and a word:
#ref,#acme,#clinic. Type it into the notes of each event that belongs to that relationship — not the title. - Make a calendar, share it with that person, and pair your main calendar to it.
- Give the pair a selective-copy rule: include, tag
#acme. Only events carrying that tag are copied. No rule at all copies everything, which is not what you want here. - Choose the projection. Busy only if they just need to know the day is taken; Copy details if the title is the point.
Tags are matched case-insensitively and as whole words, so #ref and
#ref-cup are two different tags — which is how you run several of these side
by side. One event can carry several tags, and a second mirror with its own rule picks up its
own subset. The tags themselves are stripped from the copies unless you ask to keep them.
The other direction: everything except
Sometimes the sensible rule is the inverse. A reject rule copies everything
except the events you tagged — useful when the shared calendar is mostly
complete and a handful of things must never appear. And #nomirror in an
event’s notes keeps a single event out of every mirror at once, including removing a copy
it already made.
What this doesn’t fix
Tags live in the notes of events you can edit, so they only work on your own calendars — a subscribed feed can’t be tagged, and for those you select on the event’s own properties instead: all-day, declined, free, duration, a word in the title, or a time-of-day window. And tagging is a habit: an event you forget to tag doesn’t cross over. For most people that is the right failure — silence rather than a leak — but it is worth knowing which way it fails.