Hide Work Event Details When Syncing Across Calendars

The fastest way to make people distrust calendar sync is to have a private appointment show up, by name, somewhere it shouldn't. "1:1 with recruiter," "Couples counselling," "Dr. - follow-up" - none of these belong on a calendar your manager or teammates can read. Yet the whole value of syncing is that your unavailability does show up so nobody books over it.

The resolution is availability-only sync: cross the time block, not the content. This page explains how it works and how to set it up so your calendars stay honest about when you're busy while staying silent about why.

The difference between a busy block and an event

Every calendar event carries two distinct kinds of information:

• Availability - the time range and whether it counts as busy or free. This is what scheduling logic and other people actually need.
• Content - the title, description, location, attendees, attachments, and notes. This is the private part.

Standard "full detail" sync copies both. Availability-only sync copies only the first: the destination gets a busy block (shown as "(busy)") with no title, notes, location, or attendees, covering exactly the right time. Anyone looking at that calendar learns you're occupied and learns nothing else.

Why this is the right default for a work calendar

If you sync your personal calendar into a work account so colleagues schedule around your real life, availability-only is almost always what you want:

• Your dentist appointment blocks the slot so nobody grabs it - without announcing your dentist.
• A job interview reads as a plain busy block, not as a flashing signal to your current employer.
• Family commitments are protected as time without being itemised to the office.

You lose nothing operationally. Double-booking prevention, scheduling-link availability, and "find a time" tools all run on the busy/free signal, which availability-only preserves perfectly.

Asymmetric detail: the smart setup

Detail level is set per direction, which unlocks the setup most people actually want:

• Personal → work: availability-only. Work sees that you're busy, never what for.
• Work → personal: full details. You see your actual meetings in your personal app, because there's no one to hide them from on your own calendar.

This gives you a single, complete personal view of your day while presenting a privacy-safe face to the work side. In Calendar Family it's two toggles - one per direction - not a workaround.

A note on privacy and trust

Syncing availability does require the sync service to access your event data in order to copy the time block. The question that matters is what happens to that data. Calendar Family strips titles and notes before writing an availability-only event and runs sync server-side over each provider's official API. Your calendar contents are used to sync your calendars - nothing else, with no profiling and no selling. (More on the privacy model in is calendar sync safe and private?.)

Setting it up

1. Click Add calendar, then Select your provider - Google Calendar and Microsoft Calendar - approving each on the provider's consent screen (revocable any time). Both then sit under Manage providers.
2. Click Add connection and pick the Source calendar and Target calendar to sync.
3. For the direction into a shared or work calendar, set What to share to Free/busy only.
4. For the direction into your private calendar, leave What to share on All details if you want the context.
5. Let the first sync reconcile and let ongoing changes flow automatically.

That's the entire trick. The busy blocks keep your schedule trustworthy; the missing titles keep your life your own.

For the bigger picture on combining work and personal schedules, see mirroring your work calendar to your personal calendar. To focus on the outcome, read stop double-booking work and personal. Calendar Family is free.