See your and your partner's Google Calendars in one view, three ways

The three ways at a glance

Way one: share your calendars with each other

This is Google's built-in method, and it's the right first thing to try. Each of you shares your calendar with the other, and the other's events appear alongside your own, in a different colour.

1. On a computer, open calendar.google.com. Sharing isn't offered in the phone app, so this bit needs a browser (on a phone, request the desktop site).
2. On the left under My calendars, hover over your calendar, click the three dots, then Settings and sharing.
3. Under Share with specific people or groups, click Add people and groups and enter your partner's email address.
4. Choose how much they see: See all event details, or See only free/busy (hide details) if you'd rather share less. Send the invitation.
5. Your partner accepts from the email, and your calendar appears in their list under Other calendars. Then they do the same back to you, so it works in both directions.

On your phones, the shared calendar can be switched on and off in the Google Calendar app's settings, so you can hide each other's diaries when you only want your own.

Worth knowing before you choose it

• Both events streams land in one blended grid. With two full diaries that's a wall of colour, and it's surprisingly easy to see everything and still miss the thing.
• The sharing choice is per calendar and all or nothing: full details or just busy, nothing in between.
• Your partner needs a Google account of their own. Sharing privately to a non-Google address only offers a view-only link.
• You get visibility and nothing else. The shopping list, the to-dos and the rest of the household still live somewhere else.

Pick this if you both live inside Google Calendar all day and visibility is genuinely all you're after.

Way two: a joint calendar you both write to

Instead of showing each other your own diaries, you create one extra calendar (call it Us, or Home) and share it between you with permission to edit. Joint things go on it: the holiday, the parents' evening, the boiler service.

1. On a computer, in calendar.google.com, click the plus next to Other calendars and choose Create new calendar.
2. Name it, create it, then open its Settings and sharing page.
3. Share it with your partner, this time with the permission Make changes to events, so you can both add and edit.
4. On your phones, tick the new calendar so it shows in the Google Calendar app, and add anything joint to it rather than to your own diary.

If you already run a Google family group (for sharing storage or keeping an eye on the kids' devices), you have a ready-made version of this: Google creates a Family calendar that every member of the group sees automatically.

Worth knowing before you choose it

• It only shows what somebody deliberately puts on it. Your work diary doesn't appear, so "what's your Thursday actually like?" stays unanswered.
• Somebody has to be the person who copies things across, and that person has just become the household's unpaid secretary. That's the exact problem you were trying to solve.
• The Family calendar version is visible to everyone in the group, children included, with no way to keep one entry between the two of you.

Pick this if you want one tidy diary for genuinely joint things and you'll both actually keep it up.

Way three: OurSpace, both diaries side by side

This is the one I make, so weigh what follows accordingly. OurSpace is a free shared household app for couples and families. Each of you signs into it with your own Google account and grants read-only access to your calendar. From then on the app shows the day as two columns, your name over your events and your partner's over theirs, with a month view underneath. Nothing is copied, retyped or moved; your calendars stay exactly where they are, and OurSpace never changes anything in them.

The reason it exists is what sits around the calendar. The same app holds the shared shopping list, tasks with due dates and places, an AI meal planner that drafts the week's dinners and sends the ingredients to the list, budgets, contract renewal reminders, bin-day reminders and birthdays. Each time you open it, a short digest tells you what your partner added or ticked off since you last looked, so the calendar comes with the rest of the household attached.

Worth knowing before you choose it (yes, this one too)

• It connects Google Calendars only. If one of you runs their life from Outlook or Apple Calendar, see the question below.
• You view the combined week in OurSpace rather than inside Google Calendar itself, and you carry on using Google Calendar to create your own events.
• It's a young app from a one-person firm (mine). That means fast fixes and a developer who answers email, but a smaller track record than Google.

Pick this if you want the two diaries genuinely side by side, or you want the calendar to live beside the lists, meals and money rather than on its own.

Which way should you pick?

My honest suggestion: if all you want is to see each other's week and you're both happy living in Google Calendar, use way one and spend the five minutes today. If your problem is joint events specifically, add way two on top; the two work well together. If the calendar is one symptom of a wider thing (lists on the fridge, renewal dates in a drawer, "did you book that?" most evenings), that's the job OurSpace was built for, and it's free to find out. If you're comparing household apps more widely, I've written an honest round-up of the best family organiser apps for UK households, competitors included.