As the seasons start to change, it’s a great opportunity to do a bit of cleaning. Whether you love tidying up, or aren’t really a fan… there have been noted benefits to the act of “uncluttering,” so why not start with your calendar?

This blog post will share some tips to freshen up your Fantastical calendar. We’ll discuss how to utilize specific preferences, views, and features to maximize visibility for the things you really do care about, while addressing irrelevant events and tasks, and other things you don’t really need to have front and center.

Start on Today

A quick way to reduce clutter in your calendar is to start in the present, meaning set your Fantastical preferences to start on “Today”!

Adjust your Fantastical preferences to start Week, Month, and Quarter on Today by going to Preferences > General (on your Mac), or Settings > Calendar Views > Start Week/Month/Quarter View on (on iOS). This will make it so you’re automatically starting on Today’s date and therefore seeing the most updated and relevant information.

Of course, you’ll still be able to scroll back to see past events if you’d like, however this will put your most relevant information at the forefront of your calendar.

Identical events? Have Fantastical combine them into one

Another nifty feature to quickly reduce calendar clutter is allowing Fantastical to combine identical events for you. Enabling this option through the View menu in Fantastical on your Mac, or in the “Advanced” Section of your Fantastical iOS Settings, will combine events with the same time, name, and location into one event in your calendar. This is especially useful if you have shared calendars with other people who have the same events on their calendars.

Even if identical events are attached to different calendars, they can still be combined. Fantastical will give a color visual to show that they’re attached to different calendars. Additionally, if you click the event then the event details will show the specific calendars to which the event is attached.

Hiding events, tasks, and the sidebar

Reasons to hide things in your calendar? Maybe you’re a secret agent, or maybe you’re just looking to free up some space? Do you have an event that you don’t really need to see on your calendar but don’t want to delete? Perhaps a shared calendar event added by someone else, or just something that is no longer relevant to your immediate plans?

A good option here would be to “Hide” the event from your calendar. This option lets you hide the event from view in your calendar without deleting it completely. Hiding events on Mac comes up as an option with a simple right click on the event, or if you long press an event on your iOS device. You’ll also want to make sure you have the option “Show Hidden Items” disabled in your Fantastical Preferences.

You can still easily view hidden items in the View menu of Fantastical for Mac (Fantastical > View > Hidden Items), or from the Settings section of Fantastical for iOS (Settings > Show Hidden Items).

Speaking of keeping things hidden (and another tip to freeing up some space on your calendar), you can also choose to “hide” your tasks in your main calendar views. This is done through Fantastical’s Preferences/Settings: simply disable the “Show tasks in Calendar View” setting, and with this option disabled you’ll free up calendar space while still being able to view and access you tasks via the dedicated Tasks views in Fantastical.

On your Mac, you can choose to Hide the Fantastical Sidebar completely by going to Fantastical > View > Hide Sidebar, which allows for a full view of your calendar. (If you need to see your tasks you can still click the check icon at the top of the Fantastical window to get a quick preview.) And if you’re an iPad user, you can swipe the sidebar to the left to hide it on iPad too.

Custom event colors

While it might not seem like utilizing custom colors is really “decluttering” per se, color coding is a tried and true visual that is often used as a simplification tool. And using custom event colors gives the appearance of a more tidied and organized calendar, as well as saving you the effort of having to scrutinize each event to find the one you’re looking for.

By default, events match the color of the calendar they’re assigned to. However, if you’d like to change the color of an event you can do so from the event details.

Test this out and find what works best for you and your calendar! Do you prefer to use color coding as a way to break up homogenous calendars and highlight specific events? Or will you use it to create a categorized system to further organize your events or tasks?

Even more ways to use Calendar Sets

We’ve highlighted Calendar Sets in a few of our previous blog posts already (this versatile feature just keeps on giving!), and they’re worth another mention here too. If you’re juggling a lot of different types of events or calendars, then Calendar Sets are a sure way to reduce the “noise” and clutter by separating this information into its own dedicated Calendar Set and instructing it to activate during a specific time, location, or Focus mode.

Check out this Flexireads blog post for a specific example of how one of our users implemented Calendar Sets for their everyday use, or try our blog post on Interesting Calendars, which highlights how Calendar Sets can be used with your Interesting Calendars.

How will you use Calendar Sets to declutter your calendar?

Learn more

We hope the tips and tricks shared in this post will make decluttering less of a chore and encourage you to explore ways to further customize your Fantastical calendar! You can also dive a little deeper into some of the content mentioned above, like Calendar Sets or Calendar Views. Of course if you have any questions, just let us know. You can always contact us via our website or tweet at us if you need help with anything and everything Fantastical related!