Google Calendar is free, efficient, and capable of syncing up with the rest of your life; it's an organizational treasure! Typically, we use our calendars as a reference tool, but there are some techniques to get more out of your calendar - specifically your Google Calendar.


1. Custom view your calendar

Using the small calendar on the left, you can click and drag on any range of days to quickly change your at-a-glance settings. This allows you to have a peek at two days, two weeks, three weeks - whatevs!

2. Add new events in a flash

Google Calendar looks for natural language. When I write “Lunch with Sara on Tuesday at 1pm," Google will break up and arrange that information into an event. This is handy when you’re on a call and need to be snappy about it. Either click on ‘create' and quick add or click on a day to pull up the event box.

3. Have your daily agenda sent to you

At the top right of the calendar, your default views are ‘day', week', ‘month', '4 days', and ‘agenda'. When you choose the agenda view, you get a text view of everything in list format. This is handy to get prepped for the day - but even better is setting things up to have your agenda sent to you via email or text every morning!

Do this by clicking on the drop-down menu next to one of your calendars on the left, choose “reminders and notifications," and under the heading “daily agenda" choose to receive an email with your agenda every day at 5am.

4. Coordinate meetings

Sometimes the back-and-forth of trying to schedule a time that works for all parties involved needs to be its own calendar event. Google Calendar has an option to skip this nonsense when you’re in the full event screen. Once you’ve added a time and the person you’d like to invite under “add guests", “suggested times" pops up on the right side and tells you times that work for everyone’s schedule.

5. Share calendars

I find this so handy for both my business and personal life. Whether I’m scheduling a client meeting or a vet appointment for the family dog, I can quickly see who’s available, when. Under settings, calendar, sharing, edit settings, you can invite people via email to view your calendar. This is great for busy families and business partners. You can also make your calendar public, which is great for bands, group leaders, sports teams, etc.

6. Customize reminders and notifications

I like to set my defaults to notify me the day before an appointment, two hours ahead, and again a few minutes before. This keeps me on track and prepares me mentally and physically to show up. You can get notified via pop-up message, email, and/or text message under settings, calendar, notifications, reminders and notifications.

7. Automatically decline events

This setting allows you to block off times when you’re unavailable. Google Calendar will automatically decline invitations.

Get Productive!
Consider adding these features into your existing workflow and enjoy the increase in productivity. Trust me - it’ll save you time, energy, and stress!
What are your favourite ways to use Google Calendar?