Apple's calendar application on the Mac has different views you can choose from. You can let it show all tasks of a day, a week, a month or get an overview of the whole year. However, what a lot of people don't know, you can have even a finer control over what is been shown. You can set the number of days that should be displayed in the week view. You can, for example, see not only the week, but the next 10 days. Actually, you can choose any number of days. This is very convenient if you want to look a little bit further into the future to plan your days. With the same trick you can also get a two-week-view, i.e., 14 days.

However, it is a hidden feature and you don't have direct access to it via the application menu. You have to type (or copy and paste) the following command into your Terminal and restart Calendar to see the change taken place:

defaults write com.apple.iCal n\ days\ of\ week 10

In this code example it sets the number of days in the week view to 10. However, opening the Terminal, typing the command and then restarting Calendar is not very convenient for just a quick look at the next 10 days. So, I wrote a little AppleScript that does that for me. I made various versions to get different convenient numbers of days (7, 10 and 4 days) and made a little Alfred workflow to call them quickly.

The AppleScript

The script is very simple. It basically tells Calendar to quit, calls then a script to be carried out in the Terminal and then restarts Calendar. You can easily change the script to your needs. You simply have to change the number at the end of line 4. The example below shows the script that changes the number of shown days to 10.

The Alfred workflow

You can start the AppleScript with your application of choice, like Automator, Keyboard Maestro, Launchbar, etc. My weapon of choice is Alfred.

I have implemented 3 different week views, i.e., one for 10 days, one for 14 days and one for 7 days to come back to the default view. They can be call with the keywords cal10, cal14 and call7, accordingly. You can download the worflow here.

Have fun and let me know if this is useful for you!

Work smart, be remarkable, and have a great day!
Helmut