How to keep a shared family calendar without double-booking
Double-booking happens when a family's plans live in separate calendars that never talk to each other. A shared family calendar, one place where every parent adds, edits and sees every event, colour-coded by person, fixes it. Plannie sets one up in a few minutes with two-way Google and Outlook sync.
Why do families end up with two versions of the same week?
Double-booking is a visibility problem more than a scheduling one. One parent books a dentist appointment from their work calendar, the other plans a birthday party from a group chat, and neither shows up in the other’s view until it’s too late. Add a teenager’s own calendar and a shared family calendar becomes the only fix that scales.
What stops the clashes?
A shared family calendar works when three things are true at once: everyone can see it, everyone can edit it from wherever they already are, and it updates in real time. Plannie is a shared family organiser built around exactly that: a colour-coded calendar where every household member’s events, synced in from their own Google or Outlook account, land in one view the moment they’re added.
Google Calendar and Outlook connect two-way rather than as an import, so an event created in Plannie appears in the connected calendar too, and vice versa. Nothing has to be re-entered. Apple Calendar comes in read-only: Apple doesn’t offer the same kind of API access, so Apple Calendar events show up as a subscribed feed inside Plannie. They display correctly, but changes made in Plannie won’t push back out to Apple Calendar. And every family member gets their own colour across day, week and month views, so a clash is visible at a glance instead of buried in a list.
Setting it up
- Create your household and add each family member with their own colour.
- Under Settings → Calendar, connect each adult’s Google or Outlook account (or subscribe to an Apple Calendar feed).
- Mount a tablet on the kitchen wall, or just open Plannie in any browser. See how to set up a kitchen tablet as a family calendar for that step.
Full sync details, including what happens if a connection is revoked, are in the calendar sync help article.
Frequently asked
Do both parents need the same calendar app?+
No. Each parent connects their own Google or Outlook calendar to the same Plannie household, and every change syncs both ways. Nobody has to switch apps or manually copy events.
What if someone still forgets to add something?+
Forward the email, PDF or photo to the household's Plannie email address and the Assistant files it under the right person and time. No manual entry needed.