Setting up shared calendar views
The first time I tried to set up a shared Google Calendar for my team, I thought it was just going to be clicking a blue plus button, dropping in some emails, and calling it done. Instead, I ended up with three separate copies of the same calendar showing almost the same thing… except one of them would not update when I shifted an event. If you’re starting from scratch, the simplest path is to make one calendar that lives separate from your personal one. That way if someone unsubscribes or goes heavy on the notification settings, it won’t clutter your own feed.
To do this, on the left bar where it says “Other calendars,” you click the plus sign, then “Create new calendar.” Give it a name like “Team Shifts” or “Marketing Schedule.” The naming matters more than I expected; a sloppy name like “Calendar1” seems harmless until half your team ends up subscribed to the wrong one. After creating it, you’ll need to share it from the calendar settings page, not the event itself. Under “Share with specific people,” enter each coworker’s email, and you’ll have to decide whether they can just view events, or if they’re allowed to edit and add. If you’re working with a small and trusted team, I always give full editing rights — otherwise you’ll be the bottleneck every time someone swaps a day off.
One pitfall here: sometimes the invites don’t land in inboxes immediately. I’ve had a teammate ignore the invite because it looked like ordinary spam. The workaround is to copy the “Shareable link” from the same settings page and send that in Slack with a waving hand, like “Hey, add this one.” More times than I’d like to admit, that link saved me 🙂
Making sure events show correctly
So here’s the issue that blew up the first time we really tried using shared views: I added a repeating event for weekly check ins, and half the team reported it showing up at midnight instead of 10am. It turned out those users had their Google accounts set to a different default time zone because they had joined while traveling. Lesson learned — never assume calendars sync without checking time zones.
The fix was digging into each user’s Google Calendar settings (the gear icon → Settings → Time zone) and making sure everyone is aligned. For a remote team, I usually keep the calendar itself in a “home base” time zone, then remind people they can enable the setting that shows both their own time and that base time side by side. It looks a little cluttered, but it beats missing calls.
A weird quirk: if you copy an event from your personal calendar to the shared one, it will sometimes keep your personal default notification settings. You might get spammed by double reminders, while your teammates get none. The only workaround I found was: click into the shared event, edit the notifications manually (add something like a 10 minute reminder), then hit save for all events in the series. After doing this a couple times you get used to running through the extra clicks.
Controlling who edits and who only views
The real panic moment came the day someone deleted half our events. Not intentionally — they thought they were just removing them from their personal view. But if you give “Make changes to events” permissions, Google Calendar treats deleting as a group action. Once gone, they’re gone. I had to rely on the calendar’s “Trash” folder to resurrect them. In case you haven’t seen it, you find it in the calendar settings under “View Trash.” It keeps deleted items for about a month. Seeing forty events stacked in there while I frantically restored them was… not ideal.
If you don’t want this risk, set most people to “See all event details” only, and maybe give one or two organizers the edit power. The tradeoff is you’ll get pinged for every change request, but at least you won’t have projects suddenly vanish.
One tip to reduce clutter: for people who just need to know when something is happening, but do not care about editing, you can let them subscribe using the “Secret address in iCal format.” That way they see the events in their Outlook or Apple Calendar without even touching the Google editing side. That secret link is hidden deep in the “Integrate calendar” section.
Handling overlapping personal and team calendars
The more calendars you layer, the more they bleed together. At one point I had green blocks for personal reminders, blue blocks for team events, and then a darker blue for a second team calendar. My week looked like someone threw paint at it. What helped was adjusting the color coding carefully and training myself to toggle visibility. That little eye icon beside each calendar group is a lifesaver. If I only want to focus on team shifts, I uncheck everything else.
Even so, Google likes to keep old test calendars lurking around in your sidebar forever. Cleaning them requires going into the settings for that disposable calendar, scrolling down, and hitting “Remove.” For shared calendars, you can’t really delete them unless you’re the creator — but you can hide them, and sometimes hiding is enough to restore sanity.
A practical trick for anyone mixing personal and work: always add work events into the shared work calendar right away. If you accidentally add them into your private one, your teammates won’t see them, and then there’s confusion about who’s covering what. I once booked myself for “Weekly Planning” but put it under my private calendar, so of course nobody joined. Now I force myself to double-check that tiny color marker before saving each event.
Syncing the calendar with mobile devices
On desktop, everything looks neat. But my teammate swore they couldn’t see half the events on their phone. That’s because Google Calendar on mobile hides newly subscribed calendars by default. You have to open the app, click the three lines for the sidebar, scroll a lot, then tap “Show more.” Only then can you turn on the new shared calendar with its checkbox. Until then, the events still exist — they just refuse to appear.
Another oddity: sometimes push notifications stop arriving for the shared calendar on mobile. This bug has haunted me for months. The supposed fix is going to the app settings, clearing the cache, even reinstalling. What worked once was removing the shared calendar from my account entirely, then re-adding through the web link. Annoying, but it jolted the sync back into life.
If you’re cross checking multiple devices, remember that mobile apps refresh slower than the web view. An event changed on desktop might take a couple minutes to update on your phone. When you’re moving things around for same day scheduling, those gaps cause confusion fast.
Fixing duplicate events appearing
This one drove me absolutely nuts. I had our “Team Shifts” calendar shared, and then I also imported the same ICS link into another tool that synced it back into Google… so suddenly everything doubled. Events stacked on top of each other, slightly off in color, so I couldn’t tell which one was real. Worse part is, canceling one instance would not cancel the other, leading to endless cleanup.
The only way I managed to untangle it was to completely wipe the ICS import connection and rebuild carefully. Reminder to anyone: never import the same calendar twice, even indirectly. If you’re sending that ICS link into another tool like Notion or Trello, do not let them bounce it back into your core Google account. That loop is guaranteed chaos.
Once I fixed it, I left a big pinned note to my team: “DO NOT re add unless approved.” You can imagine how many Slack DMs this saved me later. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
Restoring deleted or missing events
I mentioned the “Trash” earlier, but it deserves its own spotlight. If you think an event has disappeared, check the Trash first. You find it by going into settings for that specific calendar, not your overall account. From there, you’ll see a full list of events removed in the last month. For each one you can hit restore, and it comes back exactly where it was.
Sometimes the event isn’t really gone — it just got turned off in “My calendars.” If you untick your shared calendar box, the events vanish from view, which makes people freak out. The first time this happened, I thought my calendar was truly wiped. I was two seconds away from re importing everything before I noticed the missing checkmark. Always look there before panicking.
Another trick: enabling email notifications for event changes. In the calendar settings, there’s an option under “General notifications” where you can ask Google to email you whenever an event is deleted. That way you know if it’s a sync bug or a teammate accidentally nuked your meeting. Without that, you’re left playing detective.
Keeping everyone consistent long term
What I’ve learned after rebuilding these shared views at least three times is that consistency matters more than clever tricks. If everyone follows the same process — create in the right calendar, check time zones, avoid duplicates, only grant edit access to a couple of people — then the system mostly holds. The breakdowns always came when too many variations crept in. Someone imported the wrong link, someone created a personal copy, someone hid a calendar without realizing. It’s endless.
I keep a simple doc with three bullets: how to add an event, how to check if you’re viewing correctly, what to do if something disappears. No long training needed, just those three things. Because with shared calendars, sooner or later, somebody will say, “Hey why don’t I see tomorrow’s shift.” And the answer always lies in one of those three spots.
Earlier, I had a similar meltdown with a Zapier workflow where a duplicate trigger fired every time a Google event updated. That nightmare taught me to always assume duplication is possible anywhere data moves. Same idea applies here — check carefully before assuming the shared calendar is smarter than it is.
If you keep watch over those cracks, Google Calendar shared views can actually carry a whole team’s schedule without completely breaking your brain 😛