Help
How travel blocks work
Calendar Travel Blocks watches your Google Calendar and inserts travel blocks before every event that has a location. Each block tells you when to leave based on live traffic data. Unless an event says otherwise, travel uses DRIVING with a 5-minute buffer, departing from Home — or from your previous event when events chain together.
The sync runs automatically every 5 minutes. If traffic conditions change, the departure time is updated so your travel block always reflects the current estimate.
No block is created for events without a location, all-day events, events that already started, or events tagged [NO TRAVEL].
Getting started
- Sign in with your Google account on the onboarding page.
- Pick a block calendar — this is where travel blocks are inserted.
- Add events with locations to your source calendars.
- Wait up to 5 minutes, or click Run sync on the dashboard.
Dashboard controls
| Run sync | Triggers an immediate sync. Useful after creating or editing events. |
|---|---|
| Clear caches | Erases cached locations and directions. The next sync re-resolves everything from scratch. |
Override tags
Add any of these lines to an event's description to customise its travel block. Tags are case-insensitive, and you can combine several in one event. Everything else in the description is yours: free-form text is preserved and ignored by the app. To keep a line that merely looks like a tag as plain text, start it with # (e.g. #[MODE] this is a note).
| Tag | Effect |
|---|---|
| [NO TRAVEL] | Skip this event entirely — no travel block is created and the origin is unchanged. |
| [MODE] <mode> | Set the travel mode for the first leg. Options: DRIVING, TRANSIT, WALKING, BICYCLING. |
| [FROM] <place> | Start this leg from a different place than the previous event. |
| [TO] <place> | Head to a different destination than the event's own location. |
| [WHEN] <n> min | Custom arrival buffer — how many minutes before the event to arrive. |
| [VIA] / [STOP] <place> | Add an intermediate stop. Multiple lines accumulate (max 5). Each stop can carry its own mode after :, , or as the trailing word — that mode applies from that waypoint onward. |
Worked examples
Each example shows an event (with its description tags) and the travel block it produces.
No tags, so the defaults apply: DRIVING mode with the 5-minute standard buffer. Departure = event start − buffer − travel time.
[MODE] switches this leg to WALKING, and [WHEN] 15 min replaces the 5-minute default buffer — hence the earlier 17:35 departure.
[VIA] inserts the daycare as a waypoint. The mode after the colon applies from that waypoint onward, giving Driving → Bicycling.
Two [VIA] lines accumulate in order (max 5). Only Office North carries its own mode, so the first leg reuses Driving.
[FROM] moves this leg’s start to the Gym and [TO] retargets its destination to the bistro. The next leg still departs from the event’s own location.
[WHEN] 30 min widens Lunch’s buffer to half an hour. [NO TRAVEL] on the Gym session creates no block and leaves the chain origin unchanged.
The departure time is calculated as: event start − buffer − travel time. The block ends just before your event begins.