Back in the day before the creation of online and digital calendars, if you wanted to create an appointment or a meeting, you’d have to write it down somewhere like in a diary otherwise you might forget.
These days with digital calendars, it has become so much easier to organize meetings, invite people, and have all that information saved to the cloud and then synced across your devices like your computer, tablet, smartphone, and even smartwatch.
Google Calendar is a great example of such a platform and the best part is that it is free and since almost everyone has a Google account, it makes it easy to use and sync up with other Google services that you might also use. So, if you’d like to learn how to boost your efficient and usage of Google Calendar, we’ve compiled a list of tips and tricks that hopefully you will find useful.
So if you need a bird’s eye view of what your schedule is like for the week or month, you can, or if you want to zoom into the day to see more details about your meetings for the day, you can do that too.
Most of us work from Monday to Friday, but depending on your job and arrangement with your company, your working hours and days might be slightly different. If that is the case, you can set your working hours in Google Calendar so that when people try to schedule events with you, they will be able to see which days/hours you are actually working.
You can set your working hours/days by going to your Calendar Settings, click on “Working Hours” on the side navigation bar, click the checkbox next to “Enable working hours” and then select the days and times that you will be available.
Click the Settings icon, then click on Settings, then under “Settings for my calendars”, choose the calendar you want notifications from. Click on “Event notifications” and then click “Add notification” and then choose how far in advance you want to be reminded of upcoming events.
To do so, go to your Events page on Facebook. Highlight the event you want to attend and click the three-dots icon, then click “Add to Calendar”, then click “Export”. A “.ics” file will be downloaded to your PC, after which you can go to your Google Calendar’s Settings and select “Import & export”, select “Import” and upload the file you previously downloaded, click “Import” and it will be saved and synced to your Google Calendar.
Go to your Google Calendar Settings and under “Settings for my calendars”, click on the calendar you want a daily agenda email from, then click “Other notifications”. Click the dropdown menu next to “Daily agenda” and make sure that you’ve selected “Email”.
While Google Calendar and other Google services are more or less native to Android, you can actually sync your Google Calendar with an iPhone if you happen to use an iOS device. This means that events you schedule and get invited to on Google Calendar will be synced with the Apple Calendar on your iPhone, so you can consolidate and see everything at once.
To sync Google Calendar with your iPhone, go to your iPhone’s Settings, tap on Calendar, tap on Accounts, then tap on “Add account” and then select “Google”. Sign into your Google account and you will be given a choice of which Google services you want your data synced with. Select “Calendar” if that’s all you want. After that, launch the Calendar app on your iPhone, tap “Calendars” which should be located at the bottom and you should see your Google Calendar on the list.
You can then make further changes like changing the color to make it better stand out amongst your other calendars and events.
Just go to your Google Calendar settings, click on “World Clock” and then make sure the box next to “Show world clock” is ticked. You can then add different timezones that your employees or colleagues might be living in.