Making the Most of Google Calendar
TL;DR:
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Calendars to Have:
If I had to select the most important tool in my organization toolbox, it would undoubtedly be my to do list. A close second would definitely be my calendar. Without my calendar, basketball games and gymnastics practices would reside only in my brain or that random schedule paper that came home and promptly lost itself behind the counter.
Over the years, I have tried many different calendar options. When I used Outlook at home, I tried to keep my events in the Outlook calendar. Toodledo, my task management system, also has a calendar feature. However, what I really needed was a calendar application that would allow me to share family events to my husband, color code, keep different calendars (family, social media content, personal schedule) and be available on multiple devices (laptop, iPhone, Android phone, etc).
Finally, I landed on using Google Calendar. This system has worked well for me for many reasons. In future posts, I will describe how I am able to automate my use of Google Calendar and how this has really solidified my usage of this calendar app over any other. In this post, I will describe the different calendars I use to keep my life organized.
First, what do I mean by “calendars”? Don’t you simply have a calendar? No, not with Google. With your Google account, you can have multiple “calendars” and when you are viewing your calendar page, you can toggle on and off different calendars. Below is an example of having multiple calendars in Google:
In the above example, I have a personal calendar, a calendar just containing birthdays, a family calendar, and a Reminders and Tasks calendar just for tasks I need to complete. I have also imported a Holidays in United States calendar from another source that contains the US holidays.
The checkboxes on the left allow me to toggle on and off calendars if I don’t want to see those particular tasks. For example, if I want to print a copy of our Family Calendar to put on our fridge for the month, I can toggle off the Reminders and Tasks calendars so that those events won’t show on the print out.
When adding an event to the calendar, you can designate which calendar you want the event to appear on. This makes it easy to keep tasks separated but to also see all of your tasks if you need to see a full picture.
To get you started, here are the types of calendars I currently have and how I use them:
Our family calendar contains all of the events that are relevant to the whole family. This calendar includes sports practices, sports games, haircuts, doctor appointments, and no school days. I do print this calendar at the beginning of the month and post it on the fridge so that anyone can see what we have going in week. My husband also syncs this calendar to his phone and can keep up to date on anything that is added.
Another great feature of this family calendar is that I can color-code the events for each person. When adding an event, you can select the calendar you want to add it to and also a color to associate the task with. When the event shows on the calendar, it will be highlighted with that color. This way, for example, I can easily see if any of my daughter’s events overlap and need to be addressed, or if we have a family event during one of my son’s practices.
A big goal I have for this blog this time around is that I want to be more organized and plan ahead. To do this, I needed a way to schedule and plan my blog posts that was separate from my family or personal calendar but that I could easily see without having to manage it in another calendar application.
Google Calendar made this easy to do. I created a new, separate calendar (but still within my same Google account) named “Social Media Content”. In this calendar, I create events for each blog post I’m planning to do, each IG post, and any other milestones I have for my social media accounts and blog. I plan to be one month ahead at any given time, so I can go into my calendar and update the events with the name of the post once I have planned it out for the month. In one glance, I can see what is complete, what I still need to work on, and what is coming up.
Even more, I can easily toggle this calendar off when I want to view just my family and personal events. I can also sync this calendar to my phone and view it there as well. There are a few other sync options that I’m looking into for this calendar and since Google calendars are so well known, the sync options are endless.
As described above, Google Calendars are so well known and used, this can be a huge benefit. Many organizations that provide multiple events will give you the option to download or “link to” a Google Calendar. Our favorite NFL football team, the Seattle Seahawks, provide a Google Calendar to link to every year so that we can easily add the Seahawks games to our calendar.
On the Seahawks website, you can add games just by entering your email address:
Also, if you are in your Google Calendar, you can go to Settings and select Add Calendar | Browse calendars of interest:
Here you will find available calendars for different sports, religious holidays and other options. Any calendar you add will be available for toggling on and off as needed
Time blocking is a time-management concept that I have had some interest in. To block out my “time blocks”, I have created a separate calendar. On this calendar I might block off some of the following activities I do:
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Morning routine
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Workout
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Blog work
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Work
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Dinner with Family
These are activities I don’t want to see on my family calendar or blog content planner, but I may want to be able to toggle this calendar on to see what I planned to work on next. I still have more to do around how I can find this useful without spending too much time putting every last task into the calendar, but I thought this might be helpful if you are someone that likes to time-block your days. This is what my trial time-block calendar currently looks like for my school day mornings:
In addition to the ideas above, I have seen many other types of calendars using Google Calendars. You could create a separate calendar per person and then each person can add to their own and then also merge. All of your meal planning could be done in one calendar. You could also add work schedules to a separate calendar.
With all of these options, there are many different ways Google Calendar can help you get your time-relevant tasks in order. I know we all have so many different “streams” in our lives that need different levels of time and date tracking. Separating these into different calendars that I can turn on and off from my view at any time is exactly why I started to use and continue to use Google for my calendar tracking.
Your turn: What are you currently using for your calendar? What do you like about it? What are the challenges?
