Core How-Tos

Connect a calendar — Timeline & Now/Next

Add a public calendar feed and URLflows places your meetings right where you work: past meetings become markers in the Timeline, and your current and next meeting show up in a compact Now / Next chip on the bar, the New Tab page, and the side panel.

What you get

  • Timeline — your past meetings appear as dated markers among the times you opened bookmarks. A meeting becomes a landmark, so you can find the links you opened around it.
  • Now / Next chip — a small indicator shows the meeting in progress and the next one coming up, with a green dot for in-progress and an amber dot for coming-up. It refreshes about once a minute, so it rolls over and counts down on its own.

Calendar feeds are off by default. They never become bar buttons and are never mixed into your bookmark lists — they only power the Timeline and the Now/Next chip.

Add a calendar feed

Open Settings → Calendar, paste a public calendar (.ics) URL, and click Add. You can add more than one. webcal:// links work too — they're rewritten to https:// automatically. There are two ways to get a feed URL:

  • Secret address (recommended) — keeps the calendar private: a random token in the URL grants access and nothing is made public. In Google Calendar, go to Settings → your calendar → "Secret address in iCal format." Treat that URL like a password. Note: many companies disable calendar sharing by policy — if you don't see this option (or it's greyed out), your organization has turned it off.
  • Public calendar — for a genuinely shared or team feed, make the calendar public (Google Calendar → Access permissions → Make available to public, or Outlook / Microsoft 365 → Publish a calendar) and use its public iCal address. Anyone with the link can see those events, so use it only for calendars that are meant to be public.

Where the Now / Next chip appears

Once a calendar is connected, the chip shows up on all three surfaces:

  • Top bar — a chip on the top row (left of the clock): a status dot plus the meeting title. Hover to see both Now and Next; click to open the meeting.
  • New Tab — a card under the clock, with a progress bar on the in-progress meeting and a countdown to the next one.
  • Popup / side panel — a slim strip above the bookmark list.

An event that carries a meeting link (its own link, or a Zoom / Meet / Teams link in its location or description) opens that link when you click it, reusing the same already-open handoff as your bookmarks — so if the call is already open in a tab, you can switch to it. Events with no link are plain context markers. All-day events show as a muted context line rather than taking the Now/Next slot, and the chip hides itself when nothing is current or upcoming.

Recurring meetings & timezones

Recurring meetings are expanded into their individual occurrences, so a weekly standup shows up as the next standup (daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly rules with intervals, counts, end dates, and exclusions are supported). Timezones are resolved too: an event keeps its correct wall-clock time across a daylight-saving change, and Outlook / Microsoft 365 feeds resolve correctly because their Windows-style timezones are mapped to standard ones.

Refresh & privacy

Calendar feeds refresh on the same auto-refresh schedule as your spreadsheets and are cached separately, so a sheet error never drops your calendar data. Like your bookmark sheets, feeds are read-only and stay on your device — there's no sign-in, no backend, and no account. URLflows for Teams is free, forever.

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