Time blocking with Google Calendar on a Mac
The obvious way to time block with Google Calendar is to create calendar events for your own work. Plenty of people do it, and it works until it does not.
Here is where it breaks, and what to do instead.
Why planning inside Google Calendar goes wrong
Your colleagues see it. In most workplaces your calendar is at least partly visible. Blocking two hours for “finish the deck” is fine. Blocking forty minutes for “work out what to say to the client” is a different matter. People end up writing vague blocks, and vague blocks are much easier to ignore.
Everything is an appointment. Calendar events carry meeting semantics — invitations, availability, notifications built for “be somewhere”. Your own work is not an appointment with anyone. Treating it as one produces a calendar that is technically full and tells you nothing.
Moving a block is heavy. Rescheduling your own work should cost a drag. In a shared calendar it can mean update notifications, availability changes and, if you invited yourself, an email.
It clutters the thing you rely on. The calendar’s job is to answer “where do I need to be”. Fill it with forty personal blocks a week and that answer gets harder to find.
Making blocks is slow. A block should take about three seconds. A calendar event takes considerably longer, and that difference decides whether you plan at all.
The arrangement that works
Keep two surfaces with one source of truth for each thing.
Google Calendar holds commitments to other people. Meetings, calls, appointments. Anything where someone else needs to see your availability.
A planner holds commitments to yourself. Deep work, admin, the gym, the thing you keep postponing.
The planner reads your calendar, so meetings appear in the timeline alongside your blocks and you can see the real shape of the day. Your personal blocks stay out of the shared calendar unless you deliberately push one across.
That last part matters both ways: when you do want colleagues to see that Thursday morning is gone, you should be able to send that one block to the calendar without exporting your whole plan.
Setting it up
- Connect your Google account to the planner, read access at minimum.
- Choose which calendars to show. Most people have several — work, personal, a shared family one, a couple of subscriptions. You almost certainly do not want all of them in your planning view. Pick the ones that represent real commitments.
- Plan around what is already there. Open the day, see the meetings, put blocks in the gaps. The gaps are usually smaller than you assumed, which is the point.
- Push across only what needs to be visible. The two-hour block you do not want interrupted; not the twenty-minute admin block.
Focusly does this with Google Calendar, and with Apple Calendar, Outlook, Calendly and Notion Calendar alongside it — which matters more than it sounds, because most people’s commitments are not all in one place.
The multi-calendar problem
Almost everyone has a work Google account and a personal one, and often an Apple Calendar too. The commitments are spread across all of them, so no single calendar shows the true picture, and switching between them to plan is exactly the friction that stops people planning.
The fix is a planning surface that reads all of them at once. You do not need them merged or synced to each other — you need one view where everything that is already committed shows up together, so you can see the actual free space.
What not to do
Do not put everything in your work calendar. You will write vaguer and vaguer titles until the blocks mean nothing.
Do not create a separate “time blocking” Google calendar and plan in it. It is better than polluting your main one, but you still have the slow event creation and the meeting semantics. If you are going to have a second surface anyway, make it one designed for planning.
Do not sync every block two ways. Full two-way sync sounds tidy and produces a shared calendar nobody can read. Push across the ones that need to be seen.