CalendarGuard Strategies
A CalendarGuard strategy is an automated rule that monitors your calendar and takes action to protect your time. Strategies run continuously in the background, analyzing your schedule and creating guard events to ensure you have the breathing room you need.
How Strategies Help You
- Automatically protect your calendar without manual effort
- Ensure you have time for focused work, breaks, and transitions
- Sync busy time across multiple calendars to avoid double-booking
- Customize protection based on your schedule and preferences
Buffer Strategy
The Buffer Strategy automatically adds breathing room after busy periods on your calendar. When you have a stretch of meetings that exceeds a threshold you define, CalendarGuard creates a buffer event to protect time for you to decompress, catch up on notes, or simply take a break.
Problems It Solves
- Meeting fatigue: Back-to-back meetings leave you exhausted with no time to process information or prepare for what's next.
- Context switching: Jumping from one meeting to another without a break reduces your effectiveness and increases stress.
- Missed follow-ups: Without buffer time, action items from meetings pile up because there's no time to address them.
- Late arrivals: Running from meeting to meeting often means starting late, which affects everyone's productivity.
How It Works
You configure a "busy threshold" (e.g., 2 hours of meetings) and a buffer duration (e.g., 30 minutes). When your calendar shows consecutive busy time exceeding your threshold, CalendarGuard automatically creates a buffer event immediately after. This ensures you always have recovery time built into your schedule.
Flow Strategy
The Flow Strategy synchronizes busy time from one calendar to another. When you have events on your source calendar, CalendarGuard automatically creates corresponding blocking events on your destination calendar, ensuring your availability is consistent across all your calendars.
Problems It Solves
- Double-booking: Managing multiple calendars (work and personal, or multiple work accounts) often leads to scheduling conflicts.
- Manual sync overhead: Copying events between calendars is tedious and error-prone.
- Privacy concerns: You want to block time on one calendar without revealing the details of events from another.
- Availability confusion: Colleagues or family members can't see your true availability when it's spread across multiple calendars.
How It Works
You select a source calendar and a destination calendar. CalendarGuard monitors the source and automatically creates blocking events on the destination whenever you're busy. The blocking events don't reveal the details of your original events - they simply mark the time as unavailable, protecting your privacy while keeping your calendars in sync.
Slack Strategy
The Slack Strategy proactively reserves flexible time blocks on your calendar when your schedule becomes too packed. Rather than waiting for problems to occur, it creates "slack" in your schedule that gives you room to handle the unexpected or simply focus on deep work.
Problems It Solves
- Over-scheduling: Your calendar fills up with meetings, leaving no room for actual work or unexpected tasks.
- No focus time: Without protected blocks, deep work becomes impossible as meetings fragment your day.
- Emergency cramming: When urgent tasks arise, you have nowhere to fit them without canceling existing commitments.
- Work-life imbalance: A packed calendar during work hours means work spills into personal time.
How It Works
You set a busy threshold (e.g., more than 4 hours of meetings) and specify how many guard events to create and their duration. When your calendar crosses the threshold, CalendarGuard automatically places slack events in available time slots. These events show you as busy to others, protecting that time from being scheduled over.
Getting Started
Ready to take control of your calendar? Sign up for CalendarGuard and create your first strategy in minutes.