Get Shift Done: Tips and Tricks

Automatically Sync Your Basecamp Schedule With Your Favorite Calendar App

It’s become pretty crucial to have a well-maintained calendar to track your availability and upcoming responsibilities both at the office and at home. Easier said than done though, especially if you work on multiple teams or projects, each with their own steady stream of things to do. That’s why this Basecamp tips is so useful.

If you use Basecamp 3, you’ll be familiar with the Schedule feature available from within any project:

It does a great job of compiling your to-dos and events, so you’re able to balance your workload and plan around meetings all in one place.

But the Schedule is no replacement for a detailed calendar — it doesn’t even have a calendar view. In addition, it’s not meant to be a comprehensive overview of your tasks and meetings across all the projects you might be assigned to, much less any calendar items you track outside of work:

Fortunately there’s an easy way to add Basecamp items to your master calendar no matter where it lives. You may have noticed any event can be exported individually to Google, iCal, or Outlook (Basecamp surfaces this feature pretty nicely).

Adding events to your calendar one-by-one is a bit too much. A better option is to subscribe to a given Basecamp schedule, which will automatically export your Basecamp events and to-dos to your chosen calendar platform as they’re created. Just go back to your Schedule page, and find the Subscribe button.

From there, you’ll be given the choice of which calendar app to use. For Google calendar, it’s as easy as copying the link Basecamp provides and then follow the directions. For both iCal and Outlook, you’ll download .ics files that you can open in each app.

Now sit back and watch your events populate your master calendar, all without manual intervention!

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