Calendar Events

Hour by Hour can integrate with the calendars that you already have set up on your iPhone. You can choose for each schedule you create whether you want calendar integration enabled, since we think it can depend on a case-by-case basis whether it makes sense:

• Clean slate: Often you may be planning a day that needs to fit outside of your usual routine, such as a special trip, conference or vaccation.
• Integrate calendars: Helpful if you need to fit in items around your calendar items, or use them as a starting point.

To toggle calendar integration, tap the icon in the top right of the schedule and choose "Enable Calendar Events":

Hiding specific calendar events

You can also have a mix of the above approaches. After integrating calendars, you can also choose to hide specific events that might be irrelevant to the schedule you're planning.

This can be the best of both: hide the noise that's not relevant to your day, and keep the import things, and plan around them.

To do so, swipe the event to the left and tap the icon:

You can restore them by tapping the icon in the top right of the schedule and choosing " Show hidden calendar events".

How calendar sync works

The app keeps your calendar events in sync, but in a read-only state - you can't change the title or the time of the event. You can change the icon of the event, however! If you make changes to the calendar event externally to Hour by Hour you will see those changes reflected in the app.

Syncing happens regularly (such as when opening a schedule, and also automatically when calendars are modified outside of Hour by Hour.)

Why is calendar sync one-way? Mostly because Hour by Hour is trying to avoid becoming a full-blown calendar app! However, feel free to drop me a line if you have feedback or wish the app supported slightly more advanced calendar editing features. I'm always open to suggestions for future improvements!

Time Zones

As noted in the time zones page, Hour by Hour aims to simplify the way you interact with times compared to calendar apps - times are always "floating", meaning that the numerical time of an event is always the same. If you write "5pm", it's always local 5pm no matter where you are.

However, this can cause issues when importing calendar events: at sync time the calendar events are converted to local time. If you travel between time zones, then this means that when calendar events are synced, their timing will appear to change.