7 Google Calendar tips that will help you stay organized and productive

Time is the most valuable coin in your life. Whether we are working at home or in office, staying organized enhances our productivity as it becomes easier to switch from one task to another. Google Calendar is filled with intuitive tools and tightly integrated with other G Suite apps—including Gmail, Meet, Drive, Contacts and Sites—to help you stay on top of your day-to-day schedule. Let’s take a look at 7 Google Calendar tips that will help you plot a course for your day.

Discover a meeting time that suits everyone

At times, discovering a time that is suitable to all appears to be very tricky. Now Google Calendar is your helping hand to figure out when someone’s availability intersects with yours. Wondering how is it possible? Well, follow these steps in Google Calendar:

1. Click on Search for people on the left
2. Type in the name of someone you want to meet with
3. Pick an open time slot
4. Fill in the meeting details
5. Tap on Save

“When you invite a guest to an event, a unique Google Meet code is automatically added (you can adjust this in Settings). And for G Suite customers, dial-in information is added in case someone joins from a phone,” said Raunaq Shah, Product Manager, G Suite.

Display multiple time zones

If you do it frequently conduct meeting with people in different regions, then it’s helpful to display multiple time zones directly on your calendar. Click on the Settings icon and select Settings. Under Time zone, click the box to display a secondary time zone and choose your preferred time zone. To add multiple time zones, simply scroll to the World clock and click Show world clock. Selected time zones will show up on the left-hand side of the Calendar below the month view.

Stay attuned to others’ working hours

While scheduling a meeting, it is extremely important that one is aware of others’ working hours. Google Calendar has now made it easy to set for users to set their own working hours, and see other people’s working hours as well.

In order to set your working hours, follow these steps:

• Click the Settings icon in Calendar
• Select Settings
• Under General, click Working Hours
• Now check Enable working hours
• Select the days and times that you work

Mind you! Google has revealed that this feature can be turned on or off on a computer, but not via the mobile app.

This will not only reduce the possibility of meetings popping up outside of your working hours, Google Calendar can also automatically decline events during that time if you’ll be out of the office. “At the top of your calendar, click the first date you’ll be out of office. In the event details box select Out of office, then choose the dates. Calendar will decline meetings scheduled over your out-of-office blocks and include a custom message. Co-workers will still be able to communicate with you in Google Chat or Gmail, but they’ll see an automated notification that you’re out of office when they start a chat or email to you,” revealed Shah in a Google blog post.

Share your calendar

In order to allow your team-mates view your full details of events on your calendar, rather than only seeing “free” or “busy,” you can share your calendar broadly or with specific people. Simply go to the My Calendars section, hover over the calendar you want to share, click on More (the three vertical dots), then Settings and sharing. It’s helpful to share your personal calendar with your work account to make scheduling even easier for you. However, you can always stop sharing your calendar or adjust permissions and visibility.

Check for the visibility in privacy setting

In order to control who sees what, you can change the default visibility about certain events in privacy setting. Google provided that example that you might want to keep a confidential meeting or telehealth appointment private. For this: Open Google Calendar, now click on event that you want to update and tap on Default visibility. Choose the privacy setting for the event and click Save. You are done.

Schedule a task in a lightweight

If you wish to organize you to-do list, the key to this is schedule a task in a lightweight. Simply click on the Tasks icon on the right side panel to add a task to your calendar. Mind you! These will only be visible to you.

According to a Google blog post: “Select Add a task, give it a label or name, then add details and a date and time. You can also add tasks to your calendar from Gmail, Google Drive, or from a file in Docs, Sheets, or Slides—just look for the Tasks icon in the side panel, a column on the right side of these apps.”

Leave room for a breather

If you are working from home and have one meeting after another, ensure that you are left with a few minutes to prepare for your next meeting or even stretch. For this, you can set scheduled events in a way that you are ending the event five minutes early. All you need to do is simple open your Calendar settings window, now scroll down to Event settings and click on the Speedy meetings box.

“We’ve found that even if a meeting is scheduled to end at, say, 4:25, it tends to run until 4:30. So instead of ending meetings early, start your meetings five minutes past the hour or half-hour. You might find that those extra few minutes make a real difference,” added Shah.

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