Organize Your Life and Work with Color-Coded Sub-Calendars

Sub-calendars are a great way to sort and organize the information you need to keep on your calendar. They work like individual calendars, but are contained within your master calendar.

Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash

Sub-calendars are a great way to sort and organize the information you need to keep on your calendar. They work like individual calendars, but are contained within your master calendar.

You can assign a sub-calendar to a person, an event, a topic, a project, or, really, anything. It depends on how you use your calendar, and how you like to categorize the different areas in your work and life.

In this post, we’ll look at some of the features and ways you can work with sub-calendars.

What Are Sub-Calendars?

When you set up a calendar with Teamup, you can use it just like it is, no changes needed. But to really get the full power of Teamup working for you, you definitely want to take advantage of the endless possibilities available with color-coded sub-calendars.

Sub-calendars are individual calendars that live within your main Teamup calendar. They can be organized in folders (with multiple nesting levels possible), toggled on and off in your view, and shared individually with other people, as needed.

Note that on the free plan, you can create up to 8 sub-calendars. On the Plus plan, you can create up to 12. On the Premium plan, up to 50! For over 50 sub-calendars, you’ll want to talk with a Teamup member and we will help you set up the solution you need.

How to Create a Sub-Calendar

Creating a sub-calendar is easy: Go to Settings > Calendars, then click on the New button in the top right. Select New Calendar.

Type in the name you want your sub-calendar to have, and choose a color.

Go to Settings > Calendars, then click New; customize your calendar title and color.

How to Organize Sub-Calendars

You can group sub-calendars together within folders, simply by using the > symbol to create a hierarchy. For example, you could create individual sub-calendars for everyone on your team, under a folder called Team. You’d name them with like this: Team > Marci, Team > Ryiann, and Team > Javier.

Now you’ll have a folder named Team with those sub-calendars in it:

The sub-calendars for each team member are organized under the Team folder.

You can work with these organized sub-calendars several ways:

• Collapse the folder to hide those sub-calendars.
• Expand the folder to show those sub-calendars.
• Click the eye icon on the folder to show only events from those sub-calendars.
• Click on each sub-calendar to toggle it on or off from view.
• Click on the folder to toggle all those sub-calendars on or off from view.

There are many ways to work with sub-calendars and folders.

The sub-calendars don’t disappear when you toggle them off; the data is there, it’s just hidden from view. That way, if you want to work with events from a particular sub-calendar, or set of sub-calendars, you can focus only on them.

Hidden sub-calendars are still shown on the calendar list; they’re lighter in color, with white bars across them. To show a sub-calendar that’s hidden, click on it to bring it back to view.

Ways to Organize Sub-Calendars

Now that we have the basics down, let’s see how you could use sub-calendars to organize all the information coming your way.

Assign Sub-Calendars to Individuals

You can designate a specific sub-calendar for an individual, and then give that individual access to their own sub-calendar via a customized calendar link.

Here are a few examples:

• Organize your family life by creating a sub-calendar for each member of it. Older members of the family can input their own schedules and events. Younger children can see what’s on their agenda for the day. The calendar administrator can add homework, chores, school assignments, and more to the calendar so everyone knows what’s going on.

How Teamup Makes It Easy to Manage Family Life

• Collaborate with your team by assigning an sub-calendar to each individual; then you can assign projects to the correct sub-calendar. If you need more than one person on a project, that’s no problem. You can assign an event to more than one calendar at a time.

How to Manage a Team Handling Multiple Projects with Teamup

• Work with complex, changing class schedules by assigning a sub-calendar to each instructor. Each instructor can view a calendar, with permissions that allow them to add to — but not delete — information entered by administrators.

How The Princeton Review Makes Use of Teamup Calendar

Assign Sub-Calendars to Spaces

You can also use a sub-calendar to manage a specific space. This is particularly helpful in managing large, complex events such as conferences and trade shows. For example, you can create a sub-calendar for each meeting room, then schedule the events taking place in that room on the designated sub-calendar. Anyone can view the calendar to see when the meeting room is free, and when it has a scheduled event.

• Manage shared community spaces by creating a sub-calendar for each specific space, and allowing members of the community to book their time for the space.

How a Tennis Club Runs a Totally Decentralised Booking System

• Oversee a large, multi-use area — such as the City Park in Dublin — by creating a sub-calendar for individual areas within it and scheduling events and maintenance on the sub-calendars.

Teamup for Park Reservation at City of Dublin

See also this post on how to use Teamup as a tool for simple booking scenarios:

How to Use Teamup for Simple Appointment and Space Booking

Assign Sub-Calendars to Projects, Tasks, or Topics

Another helpful way to organize sub-calendars is to assign one for a project or task. For complex projects, you can create an entire set of sub-calendars within nested folders to keep all aspects organized and sortable.

You can also designate a sub-calendar for a recurring task or set of tasks, such as Household Chores or Menu Planning or Sales Follow-up. Then schedule the individual tasks and events related.

• Share your restaurant’s upcoming specials, or any sort of recurring discount, event, or specialty item, with a designated sub-calendar. Then share the calendar via social media (or one of the other many sharing options).

Scratch Cupcakery uses sub-calendars to share cookie flavors and dessert specials.

• Organize conference sessions by topic or track, and create a sub-calendar for each track. Add the appropriate sessions to each track, and conference attendees can easily sort and filter sessions to find the ones they want to attend.

Conference — Teamup Calendar — Shared online calendar for groups

• Establish a new habit or reach a personal goal by dedicating a sub-calendar — or a set of sub-calendars — to it. You can set milestones and deadlines, share your progress, and easily see your progress.

Build Stronger Habits with a Solid Habit Framework and Teamup (Part 1)

Sub-calendars give you a centrally managed, customizable way to work with calendar data. You can turn all sub-calendars on to see a big-picture view. You can bring selected sub-calendars into view to focus on the details, whether that’s a particular person’s schedule, the events booked in a meeting room, or a team project. You can even create a default sub-calendar view so you automatically see the information you need most often.

Sub-calendars can be created (and deleted) only by calendar administrators. So if others on your team need to add, remove, or modify sub-calendars, you’ll have to do it for them (as the calendar administrator). If you create a link with administrator permission for someone, be aware of the power you’d be givingto that user with an administrator link.

Here’s a quick video on how color-coded sub-calendars work:

Have questions? Check out our Getting Started Guide for a jump-start on all things Teamup.

Originally published at blog.teamup.com on May 25, 2018.