How To Use Travel Time In Calendar On IPhone And Mac

Travel Time is a nifty addition to Apple’s Calendar app, capable of precisely estimating the duration of your upcoming trip based on parameters such as milage and traffic. Used properly, it can notably ease some of your daily scheduling woes, but paradoxically, a large contingent of regular Calendar users still routinely overlook the feature. Formerly introduced as frequent locations and traffic conditions widgets, the service has only slowly gained traction amongst users. Travel Time today however has come of age and is now neatly integrated into one of the most popular productivity applications both on iOS and macOS. So if you didn’t get the memo on the virtues of Travel Time in Calendar, here’s what you need to know. We have all been there before: you have a jam-packed day ahead of you and already squander way too much time just scheming routes and plotting where to leave at what time. Thorough preparation cannot hurt, I grant, but keep in mind that Apple’s Travel Time has been put in place to - if not supplant - at least assist you with exactly that.

Setting up addresses and checking more boxes with every Calendar entry might sound gratuitous at first, but if the payoff is a lot less private time wasted mulling over your schedule, it is decidedly anything but that. First of all, open your Calendar and create a new entry. On filling in event information, make sure to provide the appointment’s precise address. This will be important later on to ensure accurate travel estimates that you can trust. If you know the event’s location, just go ahead and type it in the search bar, then click Done. Alternatively, start writing and wait for Calendar to suggest places. Suggestions will pop up right under another smart list labelled Recents. Tap the one you’re happy with to confirm. Now that Calendar knows where you are headed, it needs to learn about your starting point. To feed it with that piece of information, find Travel Time in the list of items and select it. Toggle the switch to the right in order to unveil a new menu.

You are now handed two options: there is a generic submenu of preset travel times, and above it (marked red), the superior smart tab. Preset times will not send you smart alerts accounting for traffic or actually take into account real data (miles), so we disregard those and instead tap Starting Location. Immediately following your touch, you are prompted to detail your departure location. The interface is akin to the one from Step 3, so type or select your starting point. Keep in mind that you can quickly hit Current Location if this is your first appointment of the day and you are situated at home. After this has been taken care of, a new set of items will pop up in the Travel Time register: this time however they are smart suggestions. As indicated by the icon next to it, Calendar has run the numbers and will predict the time you should block to get to your destination. Either by car, foot or public transport. Tick which of the three options applies to you and go back by hitting New Event. This is the final sprint: as marked below, Travel Time will now have the predicted duration locked in.

Finally, make sure that the Alert field reads Time to Leave. When clicked, the tab preceding the fine print Calendar uses your location, this event’s location and traffic conditions to tell you when you need to leave should be active. This option is auto selected and will not be a concern of yours for future events you create. You are all set for the first entry. Click Add to place the appointment in your Calendar. While thus far the process may look like an awful ordeal, do know that from here on, things get easier for two reasons. Step 9 and 10 can be skipped from here onwards. The steps required to make your Calendar entries a whole lot smarter on Mac are perhaps a little faster thanks to the trackpad. As alluded to earlier, events including smart Travel Time settings are going to take up more space in your Calendar. Here is a look at what three entries of that kind look like on my Mac.

Instead of going through the basics again, this time we will hit the ground running and simply add another (green) smart Calendar entry to the already existing ones. We don’t have to start from square one here chiefly for two reasons: one, the clicks necessary are largely identical and two, you can always refer back to the iOS tutorial if you feel a question is unanswered. In the final screenshot of the iOS rubric, you can see that I have created three blue Calendar entries, all of which already have locations attached to them. We will now create a new entry (the green box) and squeeze it between two existing appointments. Double click on the timeline (that’s in the Day view). What’s vital for Travel Time to work is that your Mac knows the location of the event (this step) and the point you are starting out from (next step). Start typing the appointment’s exact location at Add Location. Click it once suggested to confirm. The only difference compared to the iOS tutorial is that we are planting an event in the midst of others, which are each already assigned to locations. In other words, the fifth line reading travel time is already magically delivering travel estimates on the basis that Calendar knows your whereabouts before the green event. Simply select if you are travelling from the preceding event by car, foot or public transport. Click apply and your Mac will notify you whenever you need to get up from your last appointment, intelligently taking into account changing traffic conditions and alerting you if you need to leave earlier. Congratulations, you have made it to the end of it.