How to hide Google Calendar event details with Busy blocks

Your calendar knows more about you than your boss should

Your calendar title says “Therapy: Dr. Chen” or “Interview: [Competitor] role” or “Pick up [kid] from school.” None of that is anyone’s business except yours, but the moment you sync that calendar somewhere else, those titles travel with it by default in most tools. Import a calendar as an .ics feed or a straight Google Calendar share, and whoever’s on the other end sees exactly what you were doing at 2pm on Friday.

That’s the wrong default. Your co-workers, clients, or family need to know you’re unavailable, not why. A calendar invite wasn’t designed to be a broadcast; it was designed for you and the people you explicitly invited. Syncing it elsewhere shouldn’t quietly widen that audience.

The default: just “Busy,” nothing else

2calendars flips that default. When an event mirrors from one calendar to another, the receiving side shows a block of time marked “Busy.” No title, no description, no location, no attendee list, just proof that the time slot is taken. Your work calendar can’t leak your therapy appointment, and your personal calendar can’t leak your client’s confidential project name, because neither ever receives that information in the first place.

This isn’t a setting you have to remember to turn on. It’s what happens the moment you connect two calendars, before you’ve touched a single toggle.

Per-connection privacy: Busy, full detail, or a custom title

Not every relationship needs the same level of privacy, so 2calendars doesn’t force one rule onto every calendar you connect. Each sync connection has its own privacy mode. Busy only, the default, is the safest option, and the right choice for anything you connect to a client, a shared family calendar, or a work account your employer can see. Full details means the mirrored event carries the real title, time, description, and location, useful for a connection you fully trust, like syncing between your own two personal accounts. Or you can set a custom title, supplying your own label, “Blocked,” “Out of office,” “Client work,” whatever tells people you’re unavailable without telling them why.

Because this is set per connection, one Google account can feed a co-founder’s calendar with full details and a client’s calendar with nothing but “Busy,” at the same time, with no extra configuration beyond picking the setting once per connection.

Custom titles: a middle ground

Sometimes “Busy” is too vague and full details are too much. A custom title splits the difference: your team sees “Family Block” instead of “School pickup,” or your work calendar shows “Personal appointment” instead of a client’s name. You write the label once when you set up the connection, and every mirrored event through it uses that title automatically. It’s a small thing, but it’s the difference between a calendar that protects you and one you have to keep explaining.

A quick example

Say you connect your personal Google Calendar to your work calendar, two-way. On the personal-to-work leg, you leave the default: a therapy appointment, a school pickup, or a dentist visit all show up at work as a plain “Busy” block. Nobody on your team ever sees the word “therapy.” On the work-to-personal leg, you might choose full details instead, since your partner already knows your meeting schedule and a title helps them plan around it. Same account, same sync engine, two completely different privacy postures, because the setting lives on the connection, not on you globally.

If a specific event genuinely shouldn’t sync at all, a placeholder hold, or something you don’t want to appear anywhere else, tag it [nosync] and 2calendars will skip mirroring it entirely, Busy block included.

Where this fits with everything else

Hiding details is one piece of a bigger picture. If you haven’t set up your first sync yet, start with how to sync two Google Calendars, it walks through connecting accounts and choosing a direction before you get to privacy settings. If you’re managing more than two calendars, several clients plus a personal account, see syncing multiple Google accounts, where per-connection privacy really earns its keep. And if you’re still deciding which sync tool fits your setup, our comparison of Google Calendar sync tools covers how privacy defaults differ across the options.

Your calendar shouldn’t have to choose between being useful and being private. With the right defaults, it doesn’t have to, start free and see what your calendars look like to everyone else.