Alternative for allowing for shorter events to be encompassed by a longer event as if this was "free" rather than "busy"
Problem:
When having a longer event and a shorter event that needs to overlap within the longer, sometimes one may end up with these taking up half the horisontal space, which might both be confusing and impractical as your planning has the structure it has and you want your Calendar to reflect this in a way that is meaningful to you. This display can of course be helpful at it makes easy to see schedule conflicts, but sometimes it's not.
However, one may also have seen other events co-exist no problem. When you play around with this you may discover that there seems to be some rules for displaying overlapping events.
Solution:
By being aware of the following emerging rules you can make it appear as if the longer event was set as "free", rather than "busy".
- If the shorter event commences half an hour into the longer, the longer will encompass the shorter.
- Note that this half hour rule will take travel time of the event, that is longer than 3 minutes, into account. You may want adjust the travel time if you use this.
- When you got a shorter event, max half an hour, a subsequent event can start 15 minutes into the first, taking into account any travel time longer than 1 minute.
This is not a perfect solution for planning events where one is "free", not "busy", and being open for event suggestions, but it helps in displaying one's Calendar without too many events side by side. I finally had 5 minutes to see this pattern and thought I'd share my observations. These were done in macOS 14.8. Hopefully not gone in later versions. Please share if you know.