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When someone is scheduling a meeting with me, I've configured it so they can see my "Free/Busy" status. This is great, however, I also have a shared "team calendar" which has events during which I am busy but am not listed as an attendee.

These events don't show up as me being "busy" when someone is scheduling with me. Is there a way to configure my personal "free/busy" to include events from multiple calendars?

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This is tricky. When you are an calendar event attendee, Google marks you as busy. When you aren't, it doesn't.

In the absence of being an attendee at these events in the other calendar, you will probably need to add these events to your calendar which assumes you to be an attendee (unless marked otherwise).

Sync the Team Calendar to your own

This is likely a very good (perhaps off-label) use case for a Google Apps Script project on Github: derekantrican/GAS-ICS-Sync.

GAS-ICS-Sync is designed to manage syncing an ICS/ICAL feed to a Google calendar.

Essentially what it would do in your case, behind the scenes, is synchronize the events on your team calendar with your Google calendar.

Every few minutes it would check if there are any newly added/removed/changed events on the team calendar and update your own calendar as needed.

These synchronized events can have different defaults applied to them than your regular events. You can use prefixes (prefix: eventName; TeamCal: Weekly Meeting), different colors, and even set alternate permissions (e.g. make them private by default).

Why

After the initial setup your syncing will happen behind the scenes. Changes made to the team calendar will propagate to your calendar automatically. The events will be a part of your calendar and behave in a lot of respects as typical events (depending on options) while being easily distinguished from your regular events.

I am not associated with this project

I am not associated with GAS-ICS-Sync project page but am recommending it because I have used it for a few years and can recommend it as well as the support provided by the developers on Discord. It isn't uncommon to have some hiccups getting setup the first time and my experience has been that the developers are very responsive (real-time) and competent. It is one of those gems that isn't commercial but is definitely good enough to be.

How to set it up

On the GAS-ICS-Sync project page you will see a link labelled If you want to use this, please copy the script from here. The linkied script will be copied to the apps script area https://script.google.com/ of your Google account.

The script includes detailed instructions. I am not linking the script directly, rather the project, so that you can familiarize yourself with it. In order to use any script that accesses your Google account, there are some very scary warning messages that Google presents to you so that you are aware that there are risks to giving a script access to your account. This is standard with any script (even a small script added to a Google Sheet by the owner of the sheet). Visiting the project is key to being comfortable moving forward especially if you can't personally validate the code because of a lack of knowledge.

Please note that the script can be run in a logging only mode so you can see the changes without actually applying them: addEventsToCalendar="False".

Once you add the script in your Google account you customize with options that include:

  • URL of your team calendar
  • howFrequent: interval (minutes) to check for new events
  • onlyFutureEvents: If "true", past events will not be synced
  • addEventsToCalendar: If "false", you can check the log to make sure your events are being read correctly without making any changes
  • modifyExistingEvents: If "true", events in the feed that were modified after being added to the calendar will be updated
  • removeEventsFromCalendar: If "true", any event created by the script that is not found in the feed will be removed.
  • addAlerts: Whether to add alerts as notifications on the Google Calendar events, overriding the standard reminders specified by the target calendar.
  • addOrganizerToTitle: Whether to prefix the event name with the event organiser for further clarity
  • descriptionAsTitles: Whether to use the descriptions as titles (true) or to use the normal titles as titles (false)
  • addCalToTitle: Whether to add the source calendar to title
  • addAttendees: Whether to add the attendee list. If true, duplicate events will be automatically added to the attendees' calendar.
  • defaultAllDayReminder: Default reminder for all day events in minutes before the day of the event
  • overrideVisibility: Changes the visibility of the event ("default", "public", "private", "confidential")
  • emailSummary: Will email you when an event is added/modified/removed to your calendar
  • email: where you want to receive update notifications
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