How to Remove an Unwanted Time Zone from MacOS Calendar

In this entirely global world of software development, you likely find yourself working with people across multiple time zones. Keeping available time slots, meeting times, and working hour boundaries straight becomes a challenge when more time zones are added to your daily activities; adding or subtracting three hours between the East Coast and the West Coast becomes a habit, but anything more might give you a headache.

So you relent and start adding the requisite time zones to your MacOS Calendar, but...

*sigh*

You accidentally add the wrong one. Or, one blissfully departs from your daily life, and you certainly don't need the clutter in the Time Zone drop down.

No worries, just remove it, but... um, how??

The Calendar team, with all their legendary UX prowess, seem to have inconveniently omitted that capability!

After some googling around, all you find is some partially helpful advice on how to reset all Calendar settings by deleting this file:

~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iCal.plist

Great, but do you have to lose all settings??

An Apple Support article advises deleting a specific property:

defaults delete com.apple.iCal 'RecentlyUsedTimeZones'

But maybe you can do one better -- just edit the list in the Xcode:

1. Open your Calendar and select a time zone that you want to keep (i.e., not one you will be removing). Quit the Calendar app.

2. In your Terminal, type:
   open ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iCal.plist
   This will open Xcode.

3. In Xcode, expand the property named RecentlyUsedTimeZones
   

4. Locate the time zone you wish to remove and replace it with the last time zone in the list

5. Remove the last time zone in the list by clicking the minus sign next to the item key

Tada! When you open your Calendar again, everything should be as you hoped.

And never think of this minor annoyance again! 😂