The monday.com calendar: A complete guide and templates

Calendars are a great way to visualize your project in its entirety. They also allow you to easily spot critical tasks and important deadlines without having to trawl through your entire task list. Still, some teams rely on solutions like Google Calendar or Excel to handle their calendars.

While there’s nothing wrong with those platforms, they’re lacking in capabilities that can help your team become more productive. With 2 calendar options built into monday work management — Calendar View and Calendar Widget — teams can collaborate in real time, automate date-driven workflows, and gain visibility across projects.

Calendar View vs. Calendar Widget: What’s the difference?

In monday work management, there are 2 calendar experiences: Calendar View and Calendar Widget. Although they look similar at first glance, they serve different purposes depending on whether you’re managing work within a single board or monitoring schedules across multiple projects.

1. Calendar View is a board-level view that shows items from one board in a calendar layout based on date or timeline columns. Teams use it to manage day-to-day project timelines and deadlines directly inside a board.

2. Calendar Widget is a dashboard widget that pulls calendar data from multiple boards into a single view. It’s designed for managers and stakeholders who need a high-level view of schedules across projects or teams.

To make the differences even clearer, here’s a side-by-side comparison of Calendar View and Calendar Widget:

3 steps to set up and customize your monday.com Calendar View

The setup process differs slightly depending on which calendar experience you’re using. Because Calendar View is where most teams manage day-to-day project timelines, we’ll start there. Follow these 3 simple steps to configure calendar functionality in monday work management.

Step 1: Enable Calendar View on your board

In the project board where you want calendar visualization, navigate to the Views button in the top toolbar and select “Calendar” from the available view options to activate calendar display. If your board contains multiple date columns, choose which one to use for calendar positioning. Boards without Date Columns cannot display the Calendar View until you add at least one date column to define when items appear.

Step 2: Customize your monday.com calendar display

Calendar View supports extensive customization to improve readability and team adoption. These options help teams create calendar displays that match their specific workflow needs:

• Color coding: Assign colors based on status values, priority levels, or team assignments to provide at-a-glance status updates.
• Filtering: Display only specific groups, status values, or team member assignments to focus on the most relevant details.
• Display options: Switch between month, week, or day views depending on the details needed
• Item details: Configure which information appears on calendar entries

Proper customization improves calendar readability and increases team adoption by ensuring the calendar displays information relevant to daily workflows.

Step 3: Add Timeline and Date Columns

Date column setup determines how items appear on the calendar. There are 2 types of columns that support different scheduling needs:

• Date columns define specific deadlines, milestones, or single-day events, which appear as individual entries on the calendar.

• Timeline columns include both start and end dates, allowing items to span multiple days and making it easier to visualize longer phases of work.

To add these columns, click the “+” button in the board header and select either “Date” or “Timeline” from the column type menu.

Core calendar features to enhance productivity and visualization

Beyond displaying dates and deadlines, the monday.com calendar functionality integrates work management capabilities. These set the Calendar View and Calendar Widget apart from standalone applications, transforming calendars into strategic visibility platforms that support complex workflows. Here’s an overview of some features teams can employ in monday.com calendars.

1. Visual scheduling with color-coded calendars

Effective color coding strategies help teams quickly identify important deadlines, priorities, and project statuses. You can color calendar items based on the colors of your board groups, the Status Column, or the People Column on your board.

• Status-based coloring: Green for completed, yellow for in-progress, red for overdue
• Team-based coloring: Different colors for each department or team member
• Priority-based coloring: Bright colors for high-priority, muted for low-priority

2. Advanced filtering and search capabilities

Calendar views support sophisticated filtering that helps teams focus on relevant schedule information. Filtering options provide granular control over calendar display:

• Team member filtering: Display only items assigned to specific people
• Status filtering: Show only items with certain status values
• Group filtering: Focus on specific project phases or board groups
• Custom field filtering: Filter based on any column data

Search functionality allows users to quickly locate specific calendar items by name, description, or any field content. This makes finding particular deadlines or events easy on busy calendars.

3. Multi-board calendar integration

Calendar Widgets enable cross-board calendar views that aggregate data from multiple project boards, eliminating the need to check multiple calendars individually. To do this effectively, it’s important to standardize naming conventions, align status structures, and streamline tagging systems so that multi-board calendar views remain readable and useful. Organizations using monday work management can centralize calendar data across departments.

4. Mobile access for monday calendar app

Calendar views and widgets are fully accessible through monday.com’s mobile app for iOS and Android. This mobile access supports remote teams and field workers who need schedule visibility and the ability to update project status while away from their desks. Teams can keep track of everything on the go and access important features like:

• Push notifications for upcoming deadlines
• The ability to update item status directly from calendar entries
• Offline caching for limited calendar viewing when internet connectivity is unavailable

5. External calendar integrations

If you already have a Google, Apple, or Outlook Calendar, you can sync it with monday.com so that data flows seamlessly between the 2. This keeps all your important deadlines, meetings, and task dates in one place so you can avoid siloed data and switching between programs.

Once you’ve integrated your external calendars, you can also set up notifications for upcoming deadlines. That way, alerts will pop up in your monday.com calendar even without putting them in manually, meaning you’ll never miss a deadline again.

To integrate external calendars with monday.com, check out our support page for the Google Calendar integration or the Outlook Calendar integration page for more information.

5 types of calendar templates in monday.com

While setting up and customizing the Calendar View isn’t complicated, teams who want to get started even quicker can use a ready-made template to address different project needs. With the calendar templates in monday.com, teams can get a Calendar View that fits a specific requirement, whether it’s tracking employee schedules or managing a content calendar. Here’s a brief overview of a few of the different calendar templates available.

1. Work calendar

Manage your entire team’s work schedules in one shared work calendar template. Team members can view their scheduled hours, upcoming due dates or important timelines, and monitor how work is progressing. You can even integrate your work calendar with Google Calendar to keep track of everything in one place.

2. Content calendar

Whether you want to create a social media calendar to organize posting dates across different channels or you’re planning out next month’s blog posts, monday.com’s content and editorial calendar template makes it easy to stay organized. Manage publishing schedules, draft due dates, and collaborate on content without letting anything fall through the cracks.

3. Marketing calendar

Create campaigns with dynamic marketing calendar templates to keep track of all your deadlines. Plan campaigns on different channels and make sure they’re scheduled correctly, integrate your social media calendar, and make changes in real time while making sure your entire team gets updated.

4. Production calendar

Use the production calendar template to monitor important dates from pre- to post-production. Whether you’re filming promotional video content or producing a podcast, this template will help you monitor everything from crews, locations, scenes, assets, and much more.

5. Blank calendar

If you’re more into doing it yourself, then monday.com’s blank calendar template is the perfect place to start. You can use it to plan a specific event, track meetings and appointments, or just keep track of your team members’ schedules to get the big picture on what’s going on in a daily, weekly, or monthly view.

6 ways teams use monday.com calendars

The calendars in monday work management serve diverse purposes, and their real-world applications show how different teams leverage calendar features to improve coordination, visibility, and execution across various business functions.

1. Project timeline visualization

Project teams can use the Calendar View to visualize project phases, milestones, and deliverables in a traditional calendar format. This visualization helps with dependency management and deadline coordination.

2. Resource and capacity planning

Operations teams managing multiple client implementations can use the same widget to balance workload distribution, identify capacity gaps, and ensure no team member is assigned to conflicting activities.

3. Marketing campaign scheduling

Marketing teams can coordinate campaign activities using calendar views that show content publication dates, event schedules, email send times, and social media posting calendars. This visualization helps with cross-functional marketing coordination by giving content creators, designers, and campaign managers shared visibility into upcoming deadlines.

4. Team workload management

Team leads can employ the Calendar View to monitor individual and team workloads, identifying periods of high activity and potential burnout risk. This prevents scheduling conflicts and helps with workload balancing.

5. Client project coordination

Calendar features allow client-facing teams to coordinate project deliverables and client meetings. When each client’s work is color-coded, consultants can easily view and filter their complete workload or focus on specific client timelines.

6. Time-blocking for deep work

Individual contributors use calendar views for personal productivity and time management. For example, a developer may want to block morning hours on their calendar for deep coding work so that managers know not to schedule collaboration sessions at the same time.

The benefits of using a calendar template in monday work management

You may be asking yourself why you should use a calendar template like the ones in monday.com if you already have Google Calendar, Outlook, or even an Excel sheet calendar. If all you want is a calendar to show you dates and upcoming events, you’ll probably be fine with one of those options. But if you’re ready to supercharge your workflows, both calendar experiences in monday work management come with a lot of benefits.

• Real-time collaboration: Unlike static calendars, your team sees updates right away, keeping everyone aligned on deadlines and priorities and working towards the same goals.
• Intelligent automations: The calendars in monday work management allow you to trigger actions automatically based on dates, so you can reassign tasks, send due date reminders, or escalate overdue items without manual intervention.
• Unified visibility: Visualize all your projects, tasks, and deadlines in one pane of glass so that you don’t need to check multiple tools or toggle between your project management platform and Google Calendar to stay on top of meetings.
• Actionable insights: Go beyond viewing dates to learning work patterns by connecting your calendar to dashboards and reports to uncover productivity trends, potential risks or project delays, and predict resource needs.
• Built-in accountability: Shared templates and calendars in monday work management create transparency around who owns what tasks. Color-coded priorities and automated status tracking keep everyone accountable and productive.

How AI and automations can help you manage your calendars

While there are many advantages to using calendar templates, automations are arguably one of the biggest benefits to managing a shared calendar. With advanced automation and AI features, like the ones in monday work management, managers and teams can streamline repetitive tasks, reduce manual data entry, and ensure nothing important falls by the wayside.

AI-powered calendar automations help teams reduce manual work and stay on track by supporting actions like:

• Automatically sending deadline reminders and notifications
• Triggering follow-up actions when dates change or deadlines pass
• Generating summaries and reports from calendar-linked board data
• Highlighting potential workload issues when calendars are connected to dashboards

The secret to maximizing your output with AI-driven calendar management is choosing the right platform that combines flexibility with seamless integration for your existing workflows. Next, we’ll look at some specific AI and automation capabilities in monday work management that allow teams to make the most of their calendars.

Optimize projects with AI-powered calendars in monday work management

It’s probably clear by now that monday work management can help you create your next project calendar. Beyond just picking the right calendar template and plugging in your data, monday work management empowers you to accomplish a lot more thanks to built-in AI and intelligent workflow automation capabilities.

The platform’s AI capabilities take calendar and scheduling functionality a step further by providing data-driven insights and automated optimizations. These features empower teams to shift from reactive scheduling to proactive planning so that they can identify possible risks and optimize resource allocation before issues arise.

Let’s take a look at some of the AI features in monday work management that allow you to build intelligent calendars that adapt to your team’s workflows.

AI-powered calendar automations

Use AI to build smart automations that connect to items on your calendar. You can set up automations to escalate overdue items to project managers, create follow-up tasks when calendar events are completed, or adjust task priorities based on approaching deadlines.

Teams can also use AI-powered insights in monday work management to surface potential scheduling risks — such as overlapping deadlines or overloaded team members — so managers can make informed adjustments before issues arise.

AI data insights and dashboards

The calendars built into monday work management not only help you visualize schedules and tasks, but you can actually get meaningful insights based on real-time data that will help you make smarter decisions. With project dashboards and AI-generated reports connected to your calendar, you can track team productivity trends and identify risks and bottlenecks before they impact deadlines.

Smart AI assistant suggestions

With monday work management’s AI assistant, monday sidekick, built into the platform, you can get smart suggestions and reminders as you create and manage your calendar. With monday sidekick, you’ll get suggestions on how to optimize scheduling and daily reminders for important upcoming events on your calendar. Armed with AI calendar recommendations, teams can improve scheduling practices based on data rather than assumptions.

Calendar data for smarter planning

By connecting calendar data to dashboards and workload views, teams can spot patterns over time — such as recurring bottlenecks or peak workload periods — and use those insights to plan future projects more realistically.

Start building smarter calendars today

So there you have it. You now know all the ways you can make a calendar with monday.com, and how to integrate the platform with your existing calendars. No matter which monday.com calendar template you opt for, you can reap the benefits of AI and automations to take your calendars to the next level.

With monday work management’s powerful AI capabilities, you can turn basic scheduling into a powerful productivity system that keeps your team moving forward while meeting deadlines.