For consultants (and others) with multiple calendars that needs to be kept track of, a few Sync Policies will be needed and configured in the right way to meet the following requirements:
Universal availability: Appear busy and/or available across all calendars.
Privacy protected: No personal information leaks into other calendars and no client information is shared anywhere except in your core work calendar.
Contextual: Quickly tell the difference between event blocks that are supporting each client.
How to configure Calendar Sync for consultants
Take the following calendars:
Personal Calendar (PC), such as a Gmail account.
Consulting Calendar (CC), such as your main consulting practice account.
Client Calendar A (A)
Client Calendar B (B)
Client Calendar C (C)
We assume that your Consulting Calendar is fine to have details (ie: confidential information) from each Client Calendar A, B, and C.
The following 16 sync policies should be created:
Source | Target | Type | Privacy | Color |
PC | CC | Personal | Personal Commitment | Flamingo |
PC | A | Personal | Personal Commitment | Flamingo |
PC | B | Personal | Personal Commitment | Flamingo |
PC | C | Personal | Personal Commitment | Flamingo |
CC | A | Work | Work Commitment | Graphite |
CC | B | Work | Work Commitment | Graphite |
CC | C | Work | Work Commitment | Graphite |
A | CC | Work | Full Details | Blueberry |
A | B | Work | Work Commitment | Blueberry |
A | C | Work | Work Commitment | Blueberry |
B | CC | Work | Full Details | Tomato |
B | A | Work | Work Commitment | Tomato |
B | C | Work | Work Commitment | Tomato |
C | CC | Work | Full Details | Basil |
C | A | Work | Work Commitment | Basil |
C | B | Work | Work Commitment | Basil |
The color selections are arbitrary and just here to illustrate how to provide context.
With this configuration, you will ensure that:
All events on your Personal Calendar will appear as a generic personal commitments on all other calendars, without any details exposed.
All events on your Consulting Calendar will appear as a generic work commitment on all client calendars.
All events on your client calendars will be blocked on all other work-related calendars, generically in all cases except with full details on your Consulting Calendar.
Other calendar tools
With this many calendars to juggle you might want to consider a professional calendar to help out. Fantastical and Vimcal are two great paid calendar apps that can give you calendar superpowers. They are especially useful because they have added support for Reclaim-synced events, merging the copies together to make them appear as a single event to you, without the duplicate blocks showing.
You can read more in this article about how they work.