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I have both my work and home locations on my contacts card in Contacts. However, I'm working from home now far more than I used to. My work hours have remained the same however, so most of my calendar events during the day need to start from home rather than work.

Calendar.app defaults to using the "Start of Day" and "End of Day" to determine your location (or a previous event within the 3 hours preceding). This means that any events during the day always default to give my travel time from my work location, not my home location. I've noticed this even includes holidays - eg. tomorrow is Labor Day in the USA, I'll be home, but Calendar is setting Work as the start location, and not letting me override it.

How can I override that start location with one that I set?

I know I can go into the event and edit it on my phone using the iOS calendar, but that seems a little clunky when I'm at my computer I want to use the computer.

Info on the defaults I mention above from comes this Apple guide: https://support.apple.com/guide/calendar/add-location-and-travel-time-to-events-icl43600/mac

I'm on 10.15.6 (Catalina)

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4 Answers 4

Reset to default
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I figured out how to make Calendar in macOS use your home location all the time for travel time even if you keep a work address in your contact card.

If you set your "Day starts at" and "Day ends at" to "Noon", it will always use your home address. Oddly, inversely, if you set both values to "Midnight", it will always use your work address.

Hope that helps.

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This has annoyed me for SO long. I just figured it out. The clue was in the link you provided: "If Calendar doesn’t find a location, it uses your work address or home address (from your card in the Contacts app), depending on the time of day. (Set your work hours in Calendar General preferences using the “Day starts at” and “Day ends at” pop-up menus.)"

When I changed my work hours and restarted Calendar, the "Home" option appeared under "Travel Time". So it's looking for where you are in that 3 hour window and if you don't have a specific work event scheduled, it looks to see what time you started work, if that makes sense.

Happy scheduling!

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An alternative to either of the potentially-disruptive workarounds described by others is an annoying workaround - you can edit the Starting Location for a calendar event on iOS.

So, create the event on MacOS, then open the event on your iPhone or iPad, and update the starting location there. :(

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Go to Contacts. Edit. Work location pulldown menu. Select Custom. Change the name of your work location to something else.

The default address fields are home, work, school, other, and custom. You can add a custom field by going to Settings, Template tab, Address defaults, and clicking the "+" sign" in the green circle next to the "work" field.

I don't have a set work address (I freelance), so I've just been using "work" for my rented mailbox address. I solved the problem by changing that to "shipping" as a custom location.

Always seemed odd to me that "son" was the default Related Name field, so I deleted that and added "wife" and "husband" as custom fields, as those are the Related Names I use most often. I'd rather it be only one or the other, but I haven't figured out how to change the default fields list.

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  • But I like having my work location in there, and it's correct. A number of apps use work location, so it's useful to have. I just want to not use it as the default location during the day for calendar events.
    – Alex
    Commented May 20, 2023 at 21:59
  • I hate to say it, but this is probably the part where we send a message to Apple's feedback system, www.apple.com/feedback. Over decades of using Apple products and getting help from tech support senior advisors, I've been assured the feedback does get read, but not responded to. Whether they act on it... shrug. You can always call tech support. Ask for a senior supervisor. The first person you talk with is highly unlikely to be able to help, and will waste a lot of time finding out what you already know.
    – Sugar Fish
    Commented May 23, 2023 at 20:55
  • These days post COVID I'm back in the office so work addresses actually mean something. I typically create a radar ticket for these, can't remember if I did here too, it was years ago I put in the original question.
    – Alex
    Commented May 24, 2023 at 2:58
  • I'd never heard of a "radar ticket"! Cool. Per this  Developer Forum page,  doesn't use the term anymore. Feedback Assistant replaces Bug Reporter. Also... I hate being that guy, but sadly, I am (though I am, somehow, delightful at parties): we (again sadly) aren't post-COVID yet. I say "post-quarantine" or "post-COVID vax."
    – Sugar Fish
    Commented Nov 2, 2023 at 20:39

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