How to share your work calendar with your family as busy only
To share a work calendar with your family as busy only, give each family member free/busy access to that calendar. In Google Calendar the permission is called "See only free/busy (hide details)", and in Outlook it is "Can view when I'm busy"; either way your family sees blocks of time marked busy, without meeting titles, locations or notes.
This page covers both settings, the limits an employer can put on them, and what changes when a household uses more than one calendar service.
What busy only shows
A busy-only share passes on the start and end time of each event and nothing else. Your partner can see that you are unavailable from 2 to 4 pm on Tuesday, which is enough to decide who collects a child from school. They cannot see whether the meeting is a performance review or a client call.
That is usually the right level for a work calendar. Meeting titles often contain the names of clients, colleagues or projects that are not yours to share, and the family only needs to know whether you are free.
In Google Calendar
- On a computer, open Google Calendar and find your work calendar under My calendars.
- Point at the calendar, open its three-dot menu, then choose Settings and sharing.
- Under Share with specific people or groups, select Add people and groups.
- Enter the family member's email address and choose See only free/busy (hide details).
- Select Send.
The person you share with opens the calendar in their own Google Calendar (Google Calendar Help). If your work account is managed by Google Workspace, an administrator decides whether you may share outside the organisation at all, and can limit outside shares to free/busy (Google Workspace Admin Help). If the option is missing, that setting is the reason.
In Outlook and Microsoft 365
- In Outlook on the web, open Calendar and select Share.
- Enter the family member's email address.
- Choose Can view when I'm busy.
- Select Share.
Microsoft limits people outside your organisation to viewing permissions, and your organisation's policy can restrict sharing outside the organisation further or turn it off (Microsoft Support).
Where the built-in settings fall short
Both settings work well for one work calendar and one person to share it with. Most households have more than that.
- Every share covers one calendar, in one direction, for one person. Two parents who each want the other to see a work calendar and a personal calendar need four separate shares. A grandparent who helps with the school run needs four more.
- A share opens in the service it came from. A Google Calendar share is opened in Google Calendar, and an Outlook share in Outlook. A calendar can also be published as an ICS link that another calendar app subscribes to, but that copy is read-only, can take hours to show a change, and an employer can switch publishing off. When one parent uses Google and the other uses Outlook at work and iCloud at home, the week ends up spread across several apps and delayed copies.
- Children's activities have no calendar of their own. Swimming lessons and football training get added to whichever parent's calendar was nearest, and the other parent has to know which calendar to look in.
- Some employers turn sharing off. If sharing outside the organisation is disabled, there is no busy-only option to choose.
How to do it with Alfie
Alfie is our product: a family calendar app that connects the calendar accounts each person already uses (Google Calendar, Microsoft 365 and Outlook.com, iCloud, or any CalDAV server) and shows one household week. Sharing is set per calendar for the whole household rather than person by person: Full details, Busy only, or Hidden. A calendar marked as a work calendar starts as busy only, so its meetings appear in the family week as untitled blocks until you decide otherwise.
The assistant follows the same rules. If your partner asks whether you are free on Thursday at 5 pm, it can say that you are busy. It cannot say what the meeting is, because titles from a busy-only calendar are never passed to the assistant when someone else asks.
Check one thing first: some organisations require an administrator to approve any app that connects to a work account. If Google or Microsoft asks for administrator approval when you connect, that is your employer's policy, and the built-in busy-only share described above is the alternative.
To set it up, create a household, connect your work calendar, confirm that its sharing level is Busy only, and then invite the family. It takes about ten minutes, and Alfie is free to use.