Like most folks, my work calendar and my personal ones live in different accounts. And when I schedule something over on my private calendar (one of them, I use four different ones because I'm crazy), my coworkers don’t see any of that - they only see my work calendar.

So when they’re looking for a free slot, it looks like I’m wide open - even if I’ve already committed to something else. And it's driving me crazy.

This past week, after enough double-bookings and awkward “hey, can we reschedule?” messages, I got tired of manually fixing things. I wanted my work calendar to at least know when I’m busy, even if it doesn’t need to know why.

Like most recurring annoyances in my life, this felt like something I should be able to automate.

Oh yeah, it's automation time

The idea was simple: take events from my personal calendars and reflect them onto my work calendar as generic “busy” blocks. No details, no descriptions. Just enough to stop coworkers from accidentally double-booking me.

To make this work, I had a few clear requirements:

• Local-first - I didn’t want to give any third-party service read/write access to both my personal and work calendars.
• Full control - I wanted to decide which events to sync, how they’d be translated, and what metadata (if any) gets shared.
• Minimal setup - Ideally, something I could get running in under an hour without writing a pile of boilerplate.

Since I already had a local n8n instance running (left over from another automation I built around WhatsApp MCPs), it felt like the obvious choice. It ticked all the boxes — and I jumped straight into it.

Setting Up Google Calendar Access

Before I could do anything useful, I needed to let n8n access my personal calendars.

That meant setting up a Google Cloud project, enabling the Calendar API, configuring the OAuth consent screen, and creating OAuth2 credentials.

Nothing too surprising, just a series of Google Console forms you have to fight through. In the credentials setup, I selected “Web application” as the type and added n8n’s OAuth2 redirect URI.

Once Google gave me the Client ID and Secret, I dropped them into a new credential in n8n using the built-in Google OAuth2 option.

If you’ve ever done anything with Google APIs, you’ve seen this dance before. If not, the n8n docs explain it better than I want to.

Automating the Sync

The workflow I created runs every 6 hours. That’s usually frequent enough to keep things in sync without spamming the API or hammering my work calendar.

The first thing it does is fetch events from my personal calendars that were updated in the last 6 hours.

This includes new events, updates, and cancellations - basically anything that might require an update on the work calendar side.

Each calendar (I have a few) gets queried separately using the getAll operation on the Calendar API.

I use the updatedMin parameter to filter only recent changes, which is 6 hours in my case:

{{ $now.minus({ hour: 6 }) }}

After pulling from all of my personal calendars, the events are merged into a single list and processed from there.

Syncing Events to Work Calendar

Once all updated events are pulled and merged, the workflow goes over each one and decides what to do based on its state.

Cancelled Events

If the event was cancelled, it’s deleted from the work calendar. I check for status === "cancelled" and route those into a Delete node.

Nothing fancy. If it’s no longer happening, it shouldn’t block time on the work side either.

New Events

If the event is new, it gets copied over to the work calendar. The copied version keeps the same start and end time, but I override a few fields to keep things clean and private:

• The event is marked as private
• The title is just "Blocked for Personal Event"
• Visibility is set to “busy” so it shows up as unavailable to coworkers

I might eventually include the original event title here, but since I don’t know exactly who can see what in our org’s calendar setup, I’m staying on the side of caution for now.

Updated Events

If the event already exists on the work calendar (based on ID), the creation step throws an error. I catch that and instead run an update, making sure the start and end times are synced.

This takes care of reschedules or time changes without having to delete and recreate anything.

Wrapping Up

This workflow has been running quietly in the past week, and so far it’s doing exactly what I wanted: keeping my work calendar aware of my personal time, without oversharing or manual juggling.

It’s not doing anything groundbreaking (just moving data from A to B with a bit of filtering and formatting) but that’s the kind of automation I like best. Clear input, predictable output, no surprises.

I might tweak it over time (maybe loosen up the visibility settings, or add color-coding per calendar), but for now, it’s doing the job.

My calendars don’t fight anymore.

That’s a win.