How To Clean Up Your Mac Calendar

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's look at cleaning up you Mac Calendar

One place we pick up a lot of clutter on our computers is in our Calendar. If you look in the Mac Calendar App you may find it cluttered with lots of different events and make it hard to see what's coming up today or later this week. So let's clean it up!

So you can see here a pretty cluttered calendar. One reason we might get something like this is because it is so easy to subscribed to calendars online things that may look useful, but actually fill your calendar up with stuff. In this case I've got a baseball schedule here as a calendar. You can see it here in the left sidebar. If you don't see this left sidebar go to View, and then Show Calendar List. You can see it here for me it is Hide Calendar List since I have it visible. I can see all of the calendars that are visible. In this case I've got the schedule here. If I simply Hide it you can see it clears things up quite a bit because there is so many events in this calendar. I don't have to Delete it if I don't want to. I can simply Hide it and then Show it when I do want to see those events and Hide it again. But if I do want to get rid of this calendar I can Control Click it, right click or two-finger click on a trackpad and then select Unsubscribe here and it will remove the calendar. 

In addition to that you're going to find a lot of things here that aren't in your calendars but are in this section here under Other. For instance you'll see one here for Scheduled Reminders. So events that are in Reminders not in the Calendar App will show up here as long as you have this turned On. Notice a few of them here in blue. If I turn it Off, like that, then I'm not getting rid of those events. They're still there in the Reminders App and they are still here if I choose to see them. But it will clear things out. So if you find you've got tons of things here that are from Reminders, not calendar events, you may want to at least turn it Off when trying to view the rest of your events. 

There are also other items here. Birthdays. Look at the birthdays from your Contacts App and put them here. You can see a couple here. If you've got a lot of contacts you may find your calendar is crowded with these. You can simply Hide these like that and bring them up whenever you want. You'll also find other calendars like, for instance, a holidays calendar for the country that you're in. You can choose to have that On or turn it Off as you like. Another area is Siri Suggestions. This is when Siri notices events that are in email messages and it will show them here in the calendar. If you find you have a lot of those you can turn that Off so it doesn't clutter the calendar there. 

Also note that if you want to clear some of these out so you don't even see them at all you can go to Calendar and then Settings. Then under General look for Show Birthdays Calendar and Show Holiday Calendar. So you can have those so they don't even appear here. Note that if you're not going to see the Holiday's Calendar you can always create your own. Just go to File, and then New Calendar and then create a new calendar and add the holidays that you want. You can also go to File, New Holiday Calendar and then add a holiday calendar for a different region. 

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So you notice here on the left I just have this one section with My Calendars under iCloud. But you may notice more accounts here. Some of those accounts may not be accounts where you normally use the calendar but they may have things in it like holidays and such. So you want to go to Calendar and then Settings. Then go to Accounts. So notice I go into Settings Account, not calendar accounts. You want to look through your different accounts here and, of course, for your main account like iCloud you want to make sure it's enabled for Calendars. But for other accounts you want to make sure they are NOT enabled. For instance this account may have a ton of different holidays that show up by default and if I enable it I'll see those events in this calendar. So I'll see a lot of the same holidays there twice. 

Now what about the multiple calendars that you actually create. You can see here I've created one for work, personal, and family. You can create more of these and then switch them On or Off. So, for instance, I can switch off all my work events to just focus on my personal and family one. Or the other way around by switching these off. So it is handy to break things up into multiple calendars. When you create an event make sure you've got the right calendar selected when you create the new event. But you can easily switch which calendar the event is in either while creating it or after you've created an event you can still go back and switch which calendar it is in. It's really handy to have these and you may want to have even more of them if it helps you declutter. For instance you may want to have an Important Work Calendar and a not so important work calendar. Same thing for personal stuff. So then you can have normally just the important events shown and the not so important event hidden unless you want to see them. 

A lot of people will actually create multiple calendars because they like the color coding. Because for each of these calendars here you can choose one of these colors or even a custom color. But a lot of times that leads to a large number of calendars where you have events that should be grouped together actually in different calendars. I recommend just having a few calendars that make sense and not having excess ones just because you like the colors. 

Now in addition to the account in Calendars here on the left you also have an Inbox right here. In this case you've got events that you are invited to, maybe some other things here as well. So every once in a while you want to make sure you go here if you see a number there and accept or decline any of these events here. So let's say I'll accept this one and I'll decline this one. So now that is cleared out. That will also keep the badge number over your Calendar App icon in the Dock clear. 

Now changing all these settings to declutter is fine but what it really may come down to is you just have too many events in your Calendar. In that case you may want to think about adding some of them to the Reminders App instead. So, with the Reminders App you can treat some of the reminders as events. Add a date and time if you want to them for when those items are due or when that event is going to happen. About having certain things in the calendar, like maybe a long list of due dates for a project or class, it will declutter your calendar since you have all those events in here. Then you can always see them in the Calendar by turning On the scheduled Reminders Calendar.

Now there are also some options you've got that aren't in Settings but are under View. One of them here is to Show Completed Reminders. So you can actually have your Reminders visible in the Calendar and have them disappear as you complete them as long as you turn this Off. You also see All-Day events can be turned Off and Declined events, things you've been invited to and declined, that can actually be turned Off as well. Remember I had previously declined that event so if I turn this On I can actually see it here in the Calendar which could be handy but certainly could lead to a lot of clutter if you decline a lot of events.  

Another thing to consider is that it may be impossible for you to declutter the monthly calendar. It may always look a bit busy. But if you switch to one of these other views, like Week View, then things look a lot cleaner. You see all the events here at the top, like this, and events in individual boxes according to time. It makes for a very clean looking calendar even if your monthly view is very crowded. Note that if you have a lot of events that take place early in the morning or later into the evening you may want to go to Calendar Settings and then you can set the number of hours shown to 24 instead. In that way you see from 12 a.m. to 12 a.m. You're not missing any of the events because they are too early or too late. 

Now one way people may suggest to keep the clutter down here is to delete events once they have already happened. But I don't like that idea. I want to keep events archived. You may want to do exactly that by actually creating a New Calendar. Call it Archive, like that. Then have it not shown. Then once an event is over you can switch it very easily to the archived calendar. You may just want to have one archived calendar for everything or you may want to have a work archive and a personal archive. 

Now here's a few additional tips. One reason you may think your calendar looks cluttered when it's really not is because you have the window too small. So, for instance, if I were to make this window pretty small here you can see it's got a lot of these +1 mores here and things like that. A lot of people just have the calendar like this and don't realize that if they expand the calendar to get more space there's a lot more space for all the different events to appear. I have my screen resolution set pretty small. But you can make this huge usually and then have tons of white space to make it easy to see what days you have events.

A view here that's not usually very useful is the Year View. It just shows you the year, like this, and then you can jump into a specific month, I'll just double click on August like that. But there's a setting where you can have the Year View show events. Now, of course, you can't see events there. But it will put colors up here so you kind of see when there are events and when you have large areas that are empty. 

There's one more setting I want to point out that helps when you're trying to declutter because you have a lot of events. Turn On Open Events in Separate Windows. If you have it Off when you try to edit an event or look at the details it appears with this little pop-up window her. But if I want to look at another one that first one goes away. I can only look at one at a time. However, with this Setting turned On then you get a separate window that appears like that. That means you can open up multiple windows. So you can have multiple events open at the same time if you need to copy information from one to the other or compare information. 

So there's some tips for cleaning up your Calendar. Hope some of them work for you. Thanks for watching.