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 — but the public option below often still works even on a locked-down work account.
  • 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. On a work account, set the access level to "See only free/busy (hide details)" — this is often still allowed when the secret address isn't, and exposes only when you're busy (no titles, locations, or guests). Events then show as "Busy" with their times, which is enough for the Now/Next agenda and Timeline markers.

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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