Think about the last time you invited someone to an event on your calendar. Do you know what happens when you change the time of the event?

If you’re unsure of the actual time that works for attendees, you may want to reflect this in the event until you confirm.

Inviting Others

When you create a calendar event, you can invite others by choosing them from your contacts or entering an email address. Upon doing so, your invitations are sent to these recipients, though they may receive them in a variety of ways:

  • Some invitees will see the event in their calendar app with an opportunity to respond Accept, Maybe, or Decline; choosing one of these responses will usually send a message back to the creator’s event and indicate the respondent’s status
  • Invitees may get a notification on the screen with the event title and date/time and the opportunity to respond directly
  • If the calendars associated with an invitee’s email identity are not set up in a calendar app, they should receive an email with the invitation and links to respond; sometimes, issuing a response this way will succeed as above while other times it won’t have any effect and/or will produce an error
  • Sometimes (hopefully rarely), the invitation will get completely lost

The above circumstances are highly dependent on each invitee’s device setup, how they interact with the identity you invited, as well as whether the invitation crosses boundaries among multiple calendar providers, such as from iCloud to Google.

Apple has made improvements in recent years to the interoperability of these calendar accounts but the interaction remains imperfect. Plus, many users are still using old software.

Changing Times

If event attendees identify a conflict after initially scheduling an event and accepting an invitation, the creator may change the time. Depending on the device and/or application, they might edit the event details using the keyboard or drag and drop the event directly on the calendar.

Now, suppose you aren’t sure about the new time yet and you just want to remove the event from the previous time to avoid confusion. Consider changing the event title to reflect this limbo. My internal shorthand is to add a question mark to a title, but you might be more effective adding “temporary,” “placeholder,” or the like.

Invitee Experiences

Upon changing an event title, time, or other detail, invitees will receive an update, which should arrive through the same channel(s) as the original invitation.

For example, in Calendar on the Mac, you’ll find event invitations and updates in the Inbox. The button at the top of the sidebar toggles between Inbox and the list of calendars.

Your calendar app might ask if you want to notify invitees of a change. However, even if you choose not to notify, invitees will still see the event on the calendar at the new time. If the change is unexpected, you can expect to hear from them.

Unfortunately, the digital calendars most of us use on our devices are just not super well designed for collaborative scheduling. Only when multiple people have permission to manage a given calendar can they equally edit events therein and add/remove event invitees. Therefore, I recommend corresponding through other channels to firm up appointments.

Additionally, the variety of results from inviting people to events — and the potential confusion that ensues — is the primary reason I prefer to agree on coaching session times separately. I then rely on each client to record their appointment in the place that works for them and avoid inviting them to an event on my digital calendar.

Finally, I’ll add a bonus gripe I have that leads me to skip inviting clients to my calendar events: I prefer to title these events with my client’s name but would want the event on their calendar to show my name. I haven’t found any way to accomplish this.

[Update: As of late 2023, I started using Openings, a public scheduling feature of Fantastical. This satisfies my need to use my existing calendared events to influence my actual availability and permit clients to request time that doesn’t interfere. So, I’ve given into the misalignment with my event naming preference and accept the scheme that Openings uses for these events.]