How to Sync Multiple Calendars When You Work with Multiple Ventures

Nice to meet you, my name is Ethan Brown, I'm 34 years old and I'm currently the head of my own company. I am also an advisor for two other companies. In other words, I work with 3 different organizations and therefore have 3 schedules to manage. More exactly 4, if you count my personal calendar.

To explain my day-to-day professional life, imagine me juggling three balls: each representing a different company. At the same time, I'm trying to answer an important phone call and a new notification pops up.

Does this sound like your everyday life? If you often feel that every working day turns into a never-ending struggle not to drop one of those balls, you're not alone. I know the feeling.

Yet it's overwhelming. It's not about missing skills, It's simply that you haven't yet found the right tools or adopted the tried-and-tested methods.

I'm not claiming that you'll have any additional skills by the time you've finished reading this article. But I do guarantee that you'll know which tool to choose to manage your calendars.

By the way, Pulse's 2020 study shows that, according to business leaders, the number one success factor is organizational agility (35%), followed by choosing the right technologies to invest in (32%) and acquiring the necessary skills (31%).

So, instead of taking a cold shower, writing your three minutes of words of gratitude and rehashing your 10 minutes of inspiration, follow me as I explain everything you need to get there.

Common Pain Points While Splitting Your Time Across Different Companies

I've been working with different organizations for several years now. The challenge is to grow my business while remaining effective for my customers. Over time, I've identified four common issues related to organization and planning: balancing multiple calendars, avoiding double-booking, managing planning tasks manually and finally managing the complexity of technological tools.

Problem 1 : Managing Multiple Calendars

I think the problem that rotted my life the most was continually looking at my 4 calendars one after the other. It was exhausting and stressful! I'm talking in the past tense, because I solved this problem with SyncThemCalendars.

It's a very simple tool that synchronizes my different calendars from my Gmail account. As a result, I no longer have to look at 4 different blocks when planning.

Before, when I wanted to schedule a meeting with my accountant, I had to open all my calendars one by one to check that the schedule I'd chosen was free. But, as you know, time is a luxury I don't have! Now, I open one calendar, and I can see right away if I'm available on the other calendars, since they're all synchronized together. 

💡The SyncThemCalendars little plus: real-time synchronization. No need to wait a minute: as soon as I make a change on my source calendar, I can see it on my other target calendars.

It's that simple. Just set up a one-time sync with 5 clicks :

• Step #1: log in with your primary Gmail address, which will be specified as your “Source Calendar”.

• Step #2: sign in with your secondary (your “Target Calendar”) Gmail account with which you desire to sync your primary Gmail account.

• Step #3: Once you log into all the Google calendars you want to synchronize, a single click is all it takes to start the synchronization process. You have the flexibility to merge up to five Gmail accounts. Each synchronization setting is customizable, allowing you to choose the specific details that get copied across calendars, such as the event's summary, description, location, visibility, reminders, and even the color of the calendar entry.

• Step #4: there is no step 4.

Problem 2 : Avoiding Double Bookings

This problem is directly related to the previous problem: if I share multiple calendars with multiple customers or teams, all of them need to see exactly when I'm available or unavailable.

This was a huge pain point for me: on several occasions, I ended up with double bookings on different calendars. The result? I lost customers or reduce my team velocity. Honestly, I can't blame them. My lack of organization threatened my professional credibility. Who wants to work with a consultant who can't manage his own schedule? Not me, that's for sure. 

Now, when I add an event to a calendar, it instantly synchronizes with the main calendar. If the event is moved or deleted, it also disappears from my main calendar. I decide which event fields to synchronize from each calendar and use colors to quickly determine which calendar the synchronization is coming from.

Now I'm both more efficient as a consultant but also as a business owner: aligning all my calendars simplifies my life every day. 

Problem 3 : Time Lost to Manual Scheduling Across Calendars

I change my mind: this was the most unbearable problem. Manual scheduling of appointments and meetings across multiple calendars :

• is tedious. You see the tasks you put off indefinitely because you don't feel like doing them?

• is extremely time-consuming. Every minute spent manually adjusting schedules is a minute lost that could have been used for more productive tasks. 

• increases the risk of human error. 

In my opinion, automation is the solution to reduce the time wasted in manual scheduling. The impact on mental health should not be underestimated! The mental burden of keeping track of multiple schedules can be overwhelming, leading to increased stress and burnout. It happened to me. I used to spend so much time checking and re-checking my calendars, in constant fear of missing an important meeting or duplicating events.

I don't have that problem anymore. SyncThemCalendars simplifies the management of my multiple commitments, and it also restores a certain balance to my professional life by allowing me to focus on what's really important rather than getting lost in administrative details.

Problem 4 : Complexity of Tools

I think this is SyncThemCalendars' strong point. Elena Mora wrote: "That's all we do, and we do it well."

I agree: the features are designed specifically for a particular use, and the tool does it efficiently. Calendar synchronization tools are plentiful in 2024. There are some excellent ones. The common problem with many of these tools is their complexity of use, as Elena explained in the article Top 5 Calendar Synchronization Apps in 2024.

So, SyncThemCalendars is a very simple tool to set up and use. I don't need any technical knowledge, and fortunately I don't, because my real skills lie elsewhere. In just a few clicks, I set up a unique and fully customizable synchronization as soon as I sign up. Simple, fast, efficient, no time wasted. 

Best practices for managing multiple calendars

Here I give you the top three tips I wish I'd heard a few years ago. Some seem so simple, but they're so important!

Protect your privacy

Synchronizing different calendars absolutely doesn't mean giving up your privacy! I choose which events I want to appear on my calendars by customizing the synchronization.

Without a doubt, my favorite use case is that I can book family events or unavailabilities in my personal calendar and have the time slot automatically blocked in my work calendar. What's more, I can choose to hide the event data. This way, no one can know whether I'm going to the dentist or the doctor.

I can change the "Summary", "Description" and "Location" fields, for example to "Unavailable". This is what I see in my personal calendar:

Here's what my customer or my teammates sees:

Great, isn't it?

Work with your colleagues anywhere in the world

This is a use case I came across a few months ago: I've expanded my business beyond the US. I now work with English and Australian customers. This is great for business, but the different time zones complicated things at first. I'd been looking for a long time for a solution that would automatically synchronize calendars across time zones, allowing me to automate appointment scheduling across time zones. It was a relief to find SyncThemCalendars.

Block time for yourself

This is my final tip, and perhaps the most essential. Indeed, since I block out time to work on a specific task, I break the cycle of interruptions and distractions and this allows me to focus on the most important tasks. 

Other experts confirm this. Kevin Kruse, author of 15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management, believes that the most successful professionals don't use to-do lists, but rather discuss how they organize their calendars.

That's what I do, and the way I organize my calendars involves freeing up time to work effectively. I'm a consultant and an entrepreneur: if I don't give myself that time, no one else will.

PS : there are also really good ressources on the multi ventures adventure available on the breakfastleadership.com website. Strongly recommend !