How often do you stop and think to yourself, “There isn’t enough time in the day!”

We know staring at that never-ending list of tasks each day can be overwhelming, and you may feel like you do not have enough time in the day to complete them all! Although we can’t complete your schedule for you, Fantastical can help you streamline it with a bunch of helpful keyboard shortcuts.  

It may seem like a minuscule amount of time in isolation, but time saved using keyboard shortcuts in Fantastical adds up over the weeks and months, helping you become more productive and in control of your schedule. Using Keyboard Shortcuts can also be advantageous to your physical health as well, by reducing the potential for Repetitive Strain Injury to develop. 

This post will take a quick look at a day in the life of using keyboard shortcuts in Fantastical for Mac, and show how you can incorporate them into your calendaring. Let’s dive in! 

Using keyboard shortcuts during the work day

It’s Monday morning in the office, you’re tired from the weekend, the coffee barista didn’t make your coffee quite the way you like it, time is moving pretty slowly, and then all of a sudden your manager is over your shoulder pressing you for information… 

They shared their calendar with you not too long ago, and now you can see their appointments and help on busy days to manage their time. As it turns out, Kasey has called and wants to clarify the time of her next meeting with your manager. 

Rather than click around and look for the event that has Kasey’s name in the title, try using command-F to start a search for the event. 

Using this shortcut will save you the time of searching visually for the event in your busy calendar. When using Fantastical’s search, your search results will be highlighted in the calendar view and give you the ability to quickly locate the event.

After using the shortcut to search for Kasey’s event, next use the Command and down arrow keys to open the event details for the first option in Fantastical’s search results. This will let you see more details, such as the location or any notes added to the event. 

You can even use this shortcut while you’re in the middle of making a new event. Once you’re done searching and taking care of business, you can go right back to managing your schedule without skipping a beat. 

A few hours go by, lunch was great, and now it’s time for your afternoon appointments. Unfortunately, your manager isn’t feeling too well and had to take off for the rest of the day. Now their appointments will have to be moved for the remainder of the day. When calling clients to reschedule appointments, one client mentions they can come in at the same time the following day. Easy enough — just select the event while in Day or Week view and use the Control, Command, and right arrow keys to move it to the exact same time on the following day. If you need to make further adjustments, use the Control, Command and up/down arrow keys to adjust the event time by 15-minute increments.

Using keyboard shortcuts for personal calendaring

After work you make your way over to the local coffee shop, finally finding some time to work on the annual household budget. Finding a space to remain focused without distractions can be tough, and if you live in a small town, then it’s not likely to be long until Lisa, another parent from your kid’s school, approaches your table to ask if you can discuss carpool arrangements for the new term… 

But fear not! By using a few keyboard shortcuts, you can quickly take care of this little digression. First, use the keyboard shortcut to open Fantastical’s mini window (you can configure this in Settings > General) to get an overall idea of what day works for your schedule. When you have an idea of what day to choose, hold the Option key and double-click on a date in the mini window to open up Fantastical’s main window with the date you clicked on automatically in focus. Now you can double check that day’s business before fully committing to the plan.

If a quick glance at Fantastical’s mini window gives you a good enough idea of your day to be able to commit, go ahead and use command-N to make a new event and type the event details directly into Fantastical’s language parser. If you need to add some notes to the events, command-E will automatically jump your cursor to the Notes field in the event details, and you can press command-E again to return to the event title field.

Now that you’ve used these shortcuts to quickly schedule a carpool time with Lisa, you can get settled back in to your planning session, and hopefully the time saved by using these keyboard shortcuts helps you to snap back into focus before too much time has passed… 

We’re now back in the zone and ready to tackle this budget! Planning ahead helps you stay on track with your goals, so you set a meeting each week to go over your finances and make sure you’re in line with the household budget. While you’re at it, you may as well schedule your meetings for each week of the upcoming month. Use the Option key plus the left or right arrow keys to quickly jump between weeks. (Quickly jumping between time intervals like this is also possible in Day, Month, and Year views too.)

So now you’re back home from the coffee shop and needing to check on your dog’s upcoming medication schedule, you can instantly switch to the next month by using the Option and right arrow keys while in Month view, create a task for a medication reminder with command-N, and then make sure he’s all set for next month.

After settling in for the evening, you decide to create some event proposals for a weekend picnic, then use command-T to return to Today’s date and review everything you’ve accomplished!

Learn more

With all the possible key combinations that using keyboard shortcuts present, sometimes it’s easy to overlook and avoid using them. To begin with, it might seem like more work to incorporate these shortcuts into a workflow that you’re so accustomed to already. But once you get the hang of using them, we promise that using keyboard shortcuts in Fantastical will save you both time and effort, and we bet you won’t regret taking a little while to get accustomed to them!

If you need a quick overview of the keyboard shortcuts mentioned in this blog post, and more besides, be sure to take a look at our keyboard shortcuts help book entry.

We hope you’ve been inspired by these example scenarios, and start to consider how you could use keyboard shortcuts in Fantastical for yourself. Perhaps you already have a favorite keyboard shortcut? We’d love to hear from you if you do!

Thanks for reading, and see you in the next one. 🙂