Planning your weekends

Most calendar apps show you a wall of events. Presently flips the question: when are you actually free?

Connect your Google Calendar and see your entire year as a timeline of weekends, each colored by availability. Green means free. Grey means busy. It takes seconds to spot your next opening.

How it works

Weekend statuses

Every weekend gets a status based on the events in your connected calendars:

  • Free (green) — No blocking events. You’re available for whatever comes up.
  • Solo (blue) — Your calendar is clear, but a shared calendar (partner, family) has events. You’re free alone, not as a pair.
  • Draft (amber) — Only tentative plans — events ending with ? like “Cabin trip?” or “Cinema?“. These weekends could still open up.
  • Busy (grey) — Confirmed events on your primary calendar.

For individuals

Even without a partner’s calendar, Presently answers questions that are surprisingly hard to answer with a normal calendar:

  • When is my next free weekend? Tap “Next free” to jump straight there.
  • How many free weekends do I have this month? The weekend budget tracker shows a progress bar per month against your goal.
  • Am I overcommitting? Scroll through the year and see the pattern. Long stretches of grey? You might need to protect some time.

For couples

This is where Presently becomes essential. Connect both your calendar and your partner’s, and the solo status appears.

Solo means: “I’m free, but they’re not.” This distinction matters because:

  • A solo weekend is perfect for personal projects, seeing friends, or just quiet time at home.
  • But it’s not the right weekend to plan a trip together or host a dinner party.

Without this view, couples tend to double-book or miss opportunities. You each check your own calendar and say “I’m free” — but you never see the overlap until it’s too late.

Family prefixes

For even more detail, prefix event titles with codes to show who in the family is involved:

  • RXB Concert — Both of you are at the concert
  • SXB: School play — Just your partner is out
  • Events with partner-only prefixes (SXB) classify the weekend as solo rather than busy

Configure your prefix codes in the family settings. Common setups:

  • R = me, S = partner, RXB = both
  • The letters don’t matter — pick whatever works for you

Markers and conventions

Hashtags

Add hashtags to event descriptions (not titles) to categorize them:

  • #free — Marks the event as non-blocking. Use this for reminders, gym sessions, or anything that doesn’t tie you down. A weekend with only #free events still counts as free.
  • #travel, #family, #social — Show up in your stats breakdown so you can see where your time goes.

Draft events

End any event title with ? and it becomes a draft:

Maybe hiking? · Beach trip? · Dinner out?

Draft weekends show in amber. They’re a reminder that these plans aren’t locked in — you can still say yes to something better, or cancel without guilt.

Commitment periods

Add these tags to multi-day events to create colored bars on the timeline:

  • #holiday (red bar) — School holidays, bank holidays. These are prime time for travel and hosting.
  • #term (amber bar) — School term time. Teacher friends are unavailable. Traffic patterns change.
  • #hosting (purple bar) — You’re hosting visitors. Not the week to plan a spontaneous trip.

The bars appear under each week card, giving you a quick visual layer of context beyond individual events.

Planning lenses

Three built-in planning modes highlight weekends that match a specific goal:

Host visitors

Shows free and solo weekends without travel plans. The best candidates for inviting friends or family over.

Travel (PTO-efficient)

Highlights weekends near public holidays or outside school terms — ideal for long weekends with minimal time off work. Shows the PTO cost (number of work days you’d need off) for each candidate weekend.

Meet teacher friends

Finds weekends during or adjacent to school holidays — when friends who work in education are actually available.

Activate a lens from the sidebar or mobile filter sheet. Each matching weekend shows a suitability score and specific reasons why it’s a good fit.

Tips

  • Refresh on pull — On mobile, pull down to refresh your calendar data.
  • Keyboard shortcuts — Press ? to see all shortcuts. t for today, n to cycle through free weekends, f for focus mode.
  • Weekend budget — Set a monthly goal for free weekends (default: 2). The budget card tracks your progress per month.
  • Year comparison — Click “vs 2025” to see last year’s timeline below the current one. Useful for spotting seasonal patterns.
  • Focus mode — Press f to hide everything except the timeline. Full-width, no distractions.