More Fantastical 2 Tips and Tricks

After some in-person and Slack responses to my quick post on Fantastical 2, I found myself dispensing more of the random things that I can't live without.

Here's four tricks that I can't do without using Fantastical 2.

Targeting a calendar

I use lots of different calendars. I have a personal calendar for my own appointments, a work calendar for meetings, a couple work calendars I use to block off focus time, and a two family calendars (one for commitments for both my wife and I, and one as an "inbox" for things we might do.)

Using Fantastical's natural language input, if you end a string with /<substring of calendar name> you can target a desired calendar.

Working with people

I really value keyboard shortcuts, so finding Fantastical's keyboard-centric workflow for inviting people to meetings.

If in your natural language input you say something like "Hangout with John Smith at 3p", you'll see a little gray box appear around the names of people.

If you press ⌘⇧+I, you'll get a dialog that lets you pick which emails to which you want the invitation to the event sent.

If you are worried about the availability, then press ⌘⇧+A, and you'll trigger the Availability picker. I'm not aware of any keyboard shortcuts for the availability picker, but there it is.

Duplicate and mass-edit of events

I've been experimenting with hyper scheduling for a bit… there's a lot of reasons to try it, but the big takeaway I have at the moment is that I'm very aware of just how little time I have to focus and do my job. This work week after lunches, meetings, and breaks, I have 10 hours to achieve my goals.

Fantastical makes blocking off my whole work week a breeze because I can select multiple events on multiple calendars and holding ⌥+drag them around to make duplicates.

Working with search

I used to do this a lot more before I learned about the duplication trick above, but you can select and modify events from the search bar.

At my last job, we used exchange instead of gmail. I would search for all the events named "Focus : " and select them all for a week, and change their category just to get the color-coding that I find valuable to understand my week. Now that I'm on g-suite without calendar categories, I just create them in the calendar that I created to group similar events. It's not perfect, but it works.

References

• Fantastical's Documentation