Why calendar tags actually matter
The thing that made me finally take calendar tagging seriously was that my Calendar had basically turned into a pile of rainbow spaghetti. Everything was just color coded by the default Google Calendar bucket, but that does not mean anything when you actually look at the month view. A dentist appointment shows up in the same pale blue as a work meeting, and I could not remember which was which without clicking in. That might be fine if you only have ten events, but once I started cramming podcast recordings, standing Zoom calls, bill reminders, and random side projects into the same timeline, it was chaos.
What people forget is that Google Calendar does let you apply multiple calendars with their own colors, but that is not very flexible. If you have a calendar for “work” and a calendar for “personal,” great, but what happens when you want to mark some personal events as health related, others as social, others as chores… suddenly you are juggling new calendars just to fake the tagging system you wish existed. That is why I started experimenting with actual tags and not just the built in calendar colors. It is not obvious how to do it, but there are several ways to sneak them in.
How to insert tags in event titles
I was not going to overcomplicate this part. The simplest way I found was to literally start appending words in brackets or hashtags inside the event name. For example, instead of titling something “Call with Mike,” I name it “Call with Mike #client” or “Dentist appointment [health].” It looks basic, but it is searchable right in Google Calendar. If I type #client in the search bar, every event with that word shows up. And when you are staring at the month view it visually pops when you have little brackets or hashtags separating categories. Is it hacky? Yes. Does it work? Absolutely 🙂
The ugly part is you cannot really filter for tags directly unless you rely on the search bar each time. And if you are using a phone, you have to be consistent because autocorrect will try to capitalize your tags differently and then your search results get messy. I keep a tiny text file with the four or five tags I use most often and I copy paste them to avoid breaking my own format.
Color coding tags on recurring events
Now here is where my workflow broke for a while because I assumed changing the color on a recurring event would apply to all of them. Nope. It only changes the one instance if you are not careful. So I had months of green recurring events with one rogue orange one sitting in the middle and making me wonder why. The trick I finally settled on was this:
1. Create the recurring event like normal.
2. Open the series, not the instance (there is a subtle little choice between “this event” and “this and following events”).
3. Apply the color on the whole series.
That way your color stays consistent. Then I insert the tag in the title. In my weekly gym sessions they all show up in green with “Gym [health],” so I know at a glance what category that lives in. If one of them gets moved or canceled, I break it out into its own instance and sometimes recolor it purple just to remind myself it is an exception. Feels a bit obsessive, but what is the point of tags if you cannot see them at a glance.
Using tags to connect automation
Here is a real life mess that made me laugh because it was so unnecessarily complicated. I had a Zap in Zapier that was supposed to watch for new calendar events tagged [podcast] and automatically update a Trello card. Except Gmail and Calendar send descriptions, not structured tags. So my Zap had to include a filter step that looked through the event summary text for the word [podcast]. The filter accidentally passed through “[podcasting equipment return],” which was a completely different thing. Suddenly I had guest prep checklists firing off on my Trello board for shipping labels. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
To fix it, I got stricter with my tags. I now wrap them tight like ##podcast## so the automation does not pick up random collisions. You can technically store tags in the description field too, but that field sometimes gets overwritten if you sync with Zoom or Calendly, which is an easy way to silently break everything. So yeah, keep it dumb and predictable. That is usually the only way automation holds together longer than a week.
Sharing your calendar with tag context
One thing that feels awkward with Google Calendar sharing is that the person on the other end sees the tags too. I once shared my calendar link with a client and forgot that my weekend events said things like “Dinner with Steph [friends]” or “Call Alex #sidehustle.” Not terrible, but definitely not professional looking. If you are planning on sharing, you might want to use abbreviations for your tags, like [wrk] or [hlth]. That way you immediately know what bucket something belongs to, but it is more subtle to outsiders.
I even made a quick table of my main categories so I do not second guess which version of my abbreviation I used:
| Tag | Meaning |
|——|—————-|
| [wrk]| Work related |
| [hlth]| Health events |
| [soc]| Social plans |
| [pod]| Podcast stuff |
Copy pasting these saves me when I am half asleep creating an event and cannot remember if I used #podcast or [pod]. Consistency is what makes tags actually useful instead of clutter.
Mobile app tagging limitations
On desktop you can get away with layering colors and typing tags in brackets. On mobile it sometimes feels broken. The keyboard suggestion bar often removes the brackets. Also, when I try to change an event color on mobile, it does not always sync right away. I had a whole chunk of pink events that somehow turned standard blue the next day after syncing from the app. Really frustrating when part of the point of tags is color recognition.
My fix has just been to treat the mobile app for tagging as read only. I enter events and titles, but then when I am at my computer I go through once a week and clean up the tags properly with consistent formatting and colors. If you only use mobile, just expect inconsistency. You can still search for tags though, which is the part that matters most.
Tagging with Google Keep and Docs integration
This one was a happy accident. I noticed that if I paste a Google Keep note into the description box of a Calendar event, the tag word in that note gets pulled up in Calendar search too. So I can take quick notes in Keep with tags already in them and then link those notes directly to the event. Instead of packing my event title with ten different bracketed words, the title is short and clean and the description has all my extra categories hidden inside.
Then, if I search “keep:budget” I can actually dig up meetings where I left budget notes because the word exists somewhere in the event description. Sneaky, but very useful. And hey, anytime a Google app works nicely with another Google app, I take it as a win because it does not always happen 😛
Exporting tags when moving data
The last headache here is exporting. If you ever move your calendar data to another system, remember that your tags are just text in those event titles and descriptions. I once exported my Calendar to an ICS file and pulled it into Notion, only to realize Notion sorted tags alphabetically and ignored my colors entirely. So I had hundreds of events with [wrk] but they were buried in a long, flat list.
It is not a perfect fix, but I started prefixing tags with a symbol so they stand out in long exports, like @@wrk or ##hlth. That way they look distinct even with no colors. If you ever migrate calendars, double check how your new platform handles text search, because that is literally the only thing these guerilla tags depend on.
So yeah, tags make Google Calendar way more livable, but most of the tricks are duct tape. It is not elegant, but it does save me when I search next month for “##podcast##” and the only thing that shows is exactly what I needed instead of a sea of random noise.