Two jobs, and neither calendar knows about the other
4-minute read
Two employers. Two calendars. Neither can see the other, so both book over it — and you find out at 9:58 on a Tuesday when two meetings start at ten.
This is the second job, the contract that overlaps the notice period, the NHS shift alongside the private clinic, the university post alongside the consultancy. It is also one household with two working adults, and a freelancer with three clients who each think they have your Thursday.
The mechanics are always the same: a colleague opens your availability, sees a blank afternoon, and books it. They are not being careless. From where they are looking, it really is blank.
Why the usual answers fail
You can’t connect the two accounts to each other: one or both employers won’t allow a third-party service to hold a credential, and a personal booking tool doesn’t help because the problem isn’t your view — it’s theirs. Blocking out time by hand works until the other job moves something, which it does weekly.
And there is a confidentiality problem sitting underneath. Job A should not learn the client names, the patient initials or the interview you have on Friday at Job B. It only needs to learn that the time is taken.
Two mirrors, both busy-only
Point a mirror each way, and redact both. Job A’s calendar gets a copy of Job B’s commitments as blocks that say nothing but Busy, and Job B’s gets the same of A. Both sides can now see the wall they were about to book through, and neither learns anything about the other.
The setup
- Add a pair: source Job B’s calendar, destination Job A’s calendar. Set the projection to Busy only — the title becomes a word you choose, the location and notes are dropped, and the block is forced to read as busy so free/busy lookups respect it.
- Give it a title prefix if it helps —
[Other]makes the blocks obvious in a crowded week without saying anything more. - Now the same pair in reverse, source Job A, destination Job B.
- Filter each one to the hours that matter. A keep window of 08:00–18:00 on weekdays stops your evening class appearing in a work calendar at all.
- Turn on the declined and canceled filters on both. A meeting you refused is not a commitment, and it shouldn’t block the other job’s afternoon.
If both jobs’ blocks land in one shared destination and two of them describe the same hour, turn on dedupe destinations and identical blocks collapse to one. Blocks that redact differently never collapse — a “Busy” and a “Standup” at the same time are different information, so both survive.
What this doesn’t fix
The destination has to be a calendar your device can actually write to. If an employer gives you a read-only feed and no writable calendar in that account, you can’t put blocks into their system at all — no tool can. What you can still do is mirror both into one personal calendar you schedule from, so at least the times you agree to are chosen against the whole picture.
Also worth stating plainly: a busy block tells your employer that you are unavailable at a given hour. That is the information you are choosing to reveal, and some employment contracts have opinions about second jobs. Calendar Mirror can keep the details private; it can’t make the block invisible, because an invisible block wouldn’t stop anyone booking it.