10 Google Calendar Tips for Productivity (2021)

Google calendar is one of the tools I use every day to stay productive and on top of things, and today I'm going to share with you 10 of my favorite Google calendar tips.

Watch the video below, or read on for the full transcript.

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All right, welcome inside my Google calendar. The first one we're going to talk about is a secondary time zone. And for those of you who have either family in a different time zone, colleagues in a different time zone, clients in a different time zone, this can be a game changer to help ensure that you're actually agreeing to speak at the same time. Because sometimes you say one, they say three, and you think that's the same time because of the time zones. But no. One of you ends up being a no-show through no fault of your own besides confusing time zone arithmetic.

When you're inside Google calendar, all you have to do is go up to the settings gear in the upper right, click settings, and then go over here and click time zone. And then this will pop up and you can click this place: secondary time zone. And then you can pick one. Ooh, Ooh, it picked Paris. I'm cool with that. That's good for a demo. Let's go back. And now you have your dominant time zone in the right hand column here, and you have your secondary time zone in the left column here. Isn't that cool? It's so easy to set up and it's really helpful.

Now for some keyboard shortcuts! If you are like me and you tend to switch back and forth between views all the time, either from the day view to the week view to the month view, to the year view, all you have to do is type the first letter of each of those words. So if you want the day view, click D; if you want the week view, click W; if you want the month view, click M; if you want the year view, click Y. It's that simple. I tend to live in the week view cause that's just what works for me, but knowing those keyboard shortcuts is so helpful.

This next tip is a little bit about how to use Google calendar, but more like how to wrap your head around the day. You can create all day appointments in Google calendar. It's really easy. You can do that. One of two ways. You can click create, click the time, and then click all Day. Or You can just go up and click right under the number, and then the same thing will pop up. And then, now you're making an event for all day.

If you're someone who uses scheduling software, it's important to go down here and click free or busy depending on which is true for the all day event. So if you're like at an all-day day conference, for example, and you don't want clients to be able to book time with you that day, click busy. But if you're using this in the way that I'm about to suggest, you want it to be free.

And the way that I am about to suggest is to theme your days. So for example, Monday could be admin day. Tuesday could be your filming day. Wednesday could be your potato day, where you do less to recover. Thursday could be writing day. And so on and so forth.

If you're someone that likes task batching, as in, you're doing a similar task repeatedly all day long, if that's helpful for how your brain works, theming your days this way can be really helpful. And it's a great way to help guide how you time block If you also time block. Personally, I only do this when my plate is really full and overwhelmed. I'll do this during my weekly review and reset, which I do every Friday. And it helps me review the past week and plan for the week ahead. I will plan for the week ahead in such a way that I basically put my priorities at the top. Being able to have all day appointments and Google calendar can be really helpful, and some people don't know that that's an option. So there you go.

Tip number four: multiple calendars. So I probably use more calendars than is healthy, but it works for me. So if we go over here, you can see them all when these are clicked open. This is my main business calendar. And then I have two other calendars, and these are for my coaching membership, Accountability Muse. The first one is for members in the core plan. And the second one is for members in the plus plan. The only thing that goes on these calendars is group coaching calls and events that are relevant for that membership level. What's cool is I can turn them on with these handy check boxes. And the other thing is I can share them with my clients really easily so they can add these same calendars to their Google calendar. But I'm getting a little ahead of myself.

The way you can add calendars to your Google calendar, either ones that you were managing yourself or ones that you were subscribed to, is you go up to the gear icon in the upper right, go to settings, and then you go down to here and you click add calendar and you've got a number of options. You can subscribe to a calendar and you can search for a calendar here. You can create a new calendar. You can browse calendars of interest, but it's really easy to make your own calendar that you manage. You just hit create new calendar. You type the name of it. You can add a description if you want. You can set the time zone and then you just hit create calendar. And then when you go back here, it'll be added under my calendars.

Now let's talk about sharing calendars with your clients. So I want to show you how I shared the core plan calendar with my members. So back into settings, I'm going to go down to the core plan calendar, and then I clicked make available to public and see all event details. Unfortunately, a calendar has to be public in order to be shared. It's annoying, but like it's a very specific link for people to randomly find it. They have to know what they're looking for. So don't worry about it. All you have to do is click get shareable link, and then you'll have this link. And this is the link that I put inside my membership portal that makes it really easy for my clients to access this calendar and add it to their own Google calendar.

Comment below and tell me which tip you're most excited to try.

All right, tip number Six, you can click and drag to change the start or end time of an appointment instead of having to open up the appointment data and change the time manually. So let me show you what I'm talking about. So if we look at my workout block, normally people go in here and you change the start and end time here, right? You don't have to do that. You can click on the appointment and drag it wherever you want. Or let me put it back to where it was. You can hover over the bottom of a block and change how long the appointment is. Just makes it so much easier than having to actually go here, click edit, change the time, change the time, and then hit save. So much easier.

Tip number seven: duplicating events. Hahaha! I love this one instead of actually making this a recurring event, I just want to duplicate it once. Let's say something crazy happened. I was bitten by a radioactive spider, and I also want to work out on Saturday instead of starting a new appointment, changing the name of it and make sure it's in the correct calendar. Yada, yada, yada. I click on this one, I click the three vertical dots, and I click duplicate. Now, remember, don't change anything here. It's safe. Now we've got two of them, but I'm going to click and drag it to Saturday. Very easy.

The other cool thing you can do--and I do this a lot because I'm subscribed to other calendars, and this weekly review and this breakout session is actually from other calendars, but I copied them to mine so I can have that public calendar turned off because there are, for example, this breakout session, there are three instances of it on this Tuesday. I only want to see the one I'm going to attend. All you do to copy something to a different calendar is, again, you click on it, you click the three vertical dots, and then look at all these options. You can copy it to other calendars that you are an administrator of. It makes it so easy. And it's a really helpful, and it's not deleting or changing the original appointment, it's just making a copy of it that lives on a different calendar than the original appointment.

Advance recurring events. So here we do have to go into the edit the appointment thing, but if we go here right now, it says it does not repeat, but you can do all sorts of things. You can have it repeat daily. You can have it repeat weekly on the day of the week that the appointment is originally on. You can have it monthly. It already calculates.

So for example, June 10th is the second Thursday. So you could have it monthly on the second Thursday, you could have it annually on that date. You could have it every weekday, Monday to Friday, or you can do custom. And so you can choose the interval of repetition. You could even say every two weeks and you can choose day, week, month, year. So you could have it repeat every three years, if you want. A little bonkers, but whatever floats your boat.

You can choose which days of the week it repeats on. You can choose for it to end. Never. You can choose for it to end on a specific date, or you can choose for it to end after a particular number of occurrences. This one's really handy if you're in school in college and you don't want to do the math of what day your last class is on, you can just say, oh, it starts on this day. There are 10 weeks and you just have it stop after 10 occurrences. Very nice.

Tip number nine: you can really quickly recolor appointments. All you have to do is right click, not left click, right click. And then you can change the color. It's that easy. Downright boring, it's so easy, but I know there are multiple ways to color code. You can either do that on an appointment by appointment basis, or you can set a default color for each calendar. So as you can see, my main calendar is purple. My core one is peach, and all you have to do to change that is click the vertical dots to the right of the calendar and you can check your preferred color. What's cool is here now you can actually add a custom color if you know the hex code or the RGB. And so whatever the default color is, when you add an appointment to that calendar, it will start out by being that color first, and then you can edit it from there.

And last but not least, I really enjoy the Zoom calendar integration. I use Zoom for both my coaching business and my dance teaching business. And it's just really convenient to add a Zoom link to a calendar appointment if I want to have a meeting with someone. I even do that to spend time with friends. I'll put a link to the Chrome web app down here so you can check it out.

So see how we have this button down here? All you have to do instead of clicking save, we click make it a Zoom meeting and it will both save the appointment and add a unique zoom link to that appointment. If we open this up, it has all of the zoom info for that appointment.

There, you have it. 10 of my favorite Google calendar tips.

Don't forget to let me know down in the comments which tip you're most excited to try. In the meantime, if you're curious about what I do as a coach and your struggle with procrastination and resistance to any degree, I highly recommend checking out my free master class, where I teach you three mindset shifts and one simple three-step system to help you kick procrastination to the curb. All you have to do to get access is go to this link and sign up.

Check out this video next to see why I don't do my daily time-blocking inside Google calendar. If you liked this video, hit that like button and subscribe and be sure to share it with your friends. I'll be back next week with another video.

See you then. Bye.