Sometimes you may have a private Calendar that you do not want others to know what Events are on there, but you still want others to know that you are busy during those times. For example, let's say you have a private Calendar that shows you have a PTA meeting from 3:00 - 4:00 pm on Friday. You want your clients to know that you will be unavailable during that time, but you don't want them to know what for. Keep&Share’s “Free/Busy” setting will allow you to do exactly that.

Note: Being about to use “Free/Busy” is a feature available only to paid Solo and Team accounts. This does not include paid legacy accounts.

If you currently have a free Basic account, you can try a 15-day free trial of our Solo plan to try out all of our premium features.

The "Free/Busy” setting is located in the “Calendar share links, view settings, & view history” tab in your Calendar’s “Customize” screen. When you click on the check box next to this setting, this will show all of your Event content as “Busy” rather than showing the actual content of the Event. This feature will apply to Calendar Overlays, embedded Calendars, RSS Calendar feeds, and public iCalendar feeds.

Note: The “Free/Busy” setting does not apply to those with Edit Rights to your Calendar or those that have your private iCalendar link.

How to turn on the “Free/Busy” setting

To turn on the “Free/Busy” setting for your Calendar, follow the directions in the image below:

Once you have turned on this setting, see the image below for how your Events will look to Calendar Visitors:

If you have the "Show Event & Day Note content as 'Busy'" option checked, you'll see a new text field appear below the option. This text field will let you customize what you want your "Busy" text to say. See the image below:

If you want to add spaces before your custom "Busy" display text you'll need to add " " instead of typing it in using your space bar on your computer. For example, if you wanted several spaces before your text field would look like "      Reserved".

If you want to make only select events show as "busy" rather than all of the events from one calendar you also have the option of using hidden details. This advanced technique would allow you to hide event text from read-only viewers of a calendar, but as the editor of the calendar, you would be able to see what the event was about. 

Instead of an event having this text:

  • Lunch with John Doe

You would enter this exact text:

  • [  Lunch with John Doe  |  Busy ]

The text to the right of the vertical bar will be shown to read-only visitors.  The text on the right can say whatever you want.

  • [  Lunch with John Doe  |  Not Available This Time  ]

Learn more about hiding event details.