Use the iOS Calendar Smarter & Faster with These 5 Tips

Calendar is one of the most useful features of the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, and many of us wind up managing our schedules entirely through the app. But even if you’re just a casual Calendar user, you’ll still get some great use out of these five tips aimed at improving the speed of your interactions with Calendar app. You’ll learn to quickly move appointment and event times, change the calendar associated with a specific event, create new events and appointments faster, quickly check for schedule conflicts, and to navigate around all of your Calendars faster than you thought possible.

1: Move Event & Appointment Times the Fast Way

Need to reschedule an appointment or event? Changing the time or date of an event can be done incredibly fast with a tap-and-hold function:

• Within Calendars app, tap on the date with the event you wish to quickly change the time for
• Tap and hold on the event itself, then drag the event up or down to move times, or drag the event to the left or right to change days

Moving on the hourly timeline jumps in 15 minute intervals. And yes, this works with invitations as well.

2: Quickly Change an Events Associated Calendar in iOS

Need to change an appointment or events associated calendar on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch? Rather than deleting the event and adding a new one in the other calendar, just make a quick adjustment for the event itself to relocate it:

• Launch Calendars and then tap on the event you wish to change calendars for
• Tap “Edit” and then tap on “Calendar”
• Select the new calendar to reassign the event to, and then tap on “Done”

The change will carry across to all of your iCloud equipped devices, be it an iPhone, iPad, or Mac, along with any iCloud-specific shared calendars.

This is particularly useful if you accidentally placed an event or appointment into the wrong calendar (say, in Home when it should be filed under Work) which is easy to do when creating events and reminders through Siri commands since Siri will automatically choose the default calendar option for any new event.

3: Create New Events & Appointments from Emails & Check for Schedule Conflicts

You can instantly create a new event or appointment directly from any email, this is by far one of the most useful yet overlooked tricks for iOS Calendar (and Mail for that matter):

• Open any email message with a date and time in the message, then tap and hold on the time and choose “Create Event”

Wondering if there may be a scheduling conflict with a particular date and time mentioned in an email? Reveal that precise time and date in the Calendar app to see if there is any overlapping appointment, or if an event is too nearby to work out:

• Tap and hold the date in an email, then choose “Show in Calendar” to quickly look for conflicts

These two tricks are incredibly useful, use them both and you will be more efficient with Calendar app and email.

4: Set a New Appointment with Siri

Rather than launching Calendar app and adding a new event, why not turn to Siri to create the appointment for you?

• Summon Siri and say “Create appointment at [time] on [date] for [purpose]”

For example, you can ask Siri to “create an appointment at 2:15pm on August 12th for lunch meeting” and Siri will pick up the date, time, and purpose of the event, showing it back to you and asking for you to confirm the date.

Using Siri also provides the wonderful benefit of being able to set appointments largely hands-free and with spending minimal time looking at the screen, which is really useful for situations where your hands are busy doing other things.

5: Navigate Between Days, Months, and Years at Lightning Speed

Stop repeatedly tapping on the next or back arrows to jump forward a month or two, because there’s a much faster way that rips through the days, months, and years at lightning speed, all you need to do is:

• Tap and hold on the Forward or Back arrows to fast navigate

The longer you hold the arrow, the faster the navigation moves, which makes this so much faster than tapping the forward/back buttons constantly. This really is the fastest way to jump around the Calendar app.