Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity. Today, we are looking at Google Calendar, and I want to share with you some tips and tricks to help you be more productive and efficient with Google Calendar. A few things that perhaps you haven't heard of before to help you be more effective as you manage your schedule.
Now, the first one has to do with quickly adding an event. You're probably already familiar with the Create button here. By selecting this, we get our event dialog where we can add a lot of details and make many changes to that event.
But what if we want to do things a bit quicker? Well, directly to the right of Create, we have this little drop-down arrow, and this is the Quick Add functionality.
Here, we can just type in our event very much like we would in a conversation. For example, I want to add a meeting with Sam at 11:00 a.m. on October 9th. I can just hit Enter on my keyboard or hit the Add button to the right, and look at that—immediately, it is placed exactly with the information that I gave it.
Of course, I can always open up this event and add more details if I want later, but sometimes we just want to immediately add that event without having to scroll or find the exact date on our calendar. So just use the Quick Add, and you don't even have to add the date itself. You can use terms such as "tomorrow" or "next Wednesday," and Google Calendar will find the appropriate spot and create that event.
Next up, let's take a look at how we can receive a daily agenda. Maybe we don't want to pop into our calendar first thing in the morning. Perhaps we would like to receive a summary via email.
To do so, click the Settings icon (the gearbox) and then come down to Settings. The first thing we're going to want to do is select which calendar we want to receive this email agenda for. Select Calendars. Chances are you're probably managing more than just one calendar within Google Calendar.
I'm going to come over here and select Edit Notifications. Select Edit Notifications, and we have a variety of options here on this page. But the one that we're looking for is near the bottom, and that's the Daily Agenda. By selecting this checkbox, I'm going to receive an email with my agenda every day at 5 a.m. in my current time zone.
Now, you can't change the time when you receive this agenda, but I think for most people 5 a.m. is early enough. With this selected, and don't forget to hit Save when you're changing or adjusting settings here within Google Calendar. Hit Save, and I'm going back to my calendar.
Starting tomorrow morning at 5 a.m., I'm going to receive a nice summary—a single email with a summary of all of my events for that day, and it will also include all-day events. So both all the events and those events that have a specific time will be sent via email.
Next up is a very powerful feature for giving others an opportunity to book you or to find time that is available on your calendar. It’s called Appointment Slots. One note is that this is only for Google Apps customers. You must be a Google Apps customer to use this functionality.
Let me give you an example. I provide productivity coaching, and perhaps I want to allow some 30-minute intervals or slots for my students to sign up for their coaching appointments. I'm going to go here and drag my cursor for this block between 12:00 and 5:00 p.m.
Before I type in anything, you'll see at the top I've got two options: Event is selected by default, but I'm going to select Appointment Slots. Now I'm going to give this a name, I'll call it Coaching. I've already selected the time frame, and I can select the calendar that I want it to be on. I'll select Test Calendar in this case.
I've got two choices down below. I can either offer this as a single appointment slot, but that's not really what I want. I want the second one here, offering multiple slots of 30-minute intervals. I can change those intervals if I like. I’m going to select Create, and you'll notice it gives this a slightly different icon. It's showing me that these are appointment slots, and in the parentheses, it’s showing me the duration of those appointment slots.
Now it's on my calendar. What’s the next step? I’m going to click on this event, and here not only can I make some changes to that event if I want to, but I am given a unique URL. This is what I'm going to be sharing, or I can add guests directly if I want to via email.
Let’s click on this link. By giving them this link, they get a shared view of my calendar, and they may have to scroll to the date that they’re looking for. But here’s where I created those slots. Now you can see I've got my 30-minute intervals for coaching. They can come in here and book which slot they would like. Let’s say someone would like the 1 p.m. slot; they select it, and here are the details. All they have to do is select Save, and that books them for that appointment slot.
So a very powerful tool, especially if you are a coach or providing some other service and want to give some office hours to your students or clients. You book the time that you're available and then allow your customers or clients to book the slots that they would like to use.
All right, next up, I want to show you some things in Labs. Yes, most Google products have additional functionality that you need to enable or disable one by one, and these are some special features or powers.
Once again, we're going to go back to Settings. This time, we're going to click on Labs. I want to show you two of my favorite Lab functionalities. By default, when you open up your Google Calendar account, these will all be disabled.
The first one I want to highlight is called Hide Morning and Night. I’m going to select Enable, and what this Lab edition does is minimize a period of time both in the morning and the night that I don't want to see.
For example, here’s the question it asks you: when’s the last time you had a meeting at 3:00 a.m.? There’s probably some of you watching this video that do have meetings at 3:00 a.m. with clients or team members on the other side of the world. But perhaps this is extremely rare, or perhaps you never have a meeting at that time of day.
So let’s enable this. Once again, don’t forget to hit Save, and we’re going to go back. It’s going to refresh your calendar, and what has happened is that at the top and at the bottom, it has condensed a certain time frame.
Between 12:00 a.m. and 7:00 a.m., it’s not showing me anything there, and between 6:00 p.m. and 12:00 a.m., it’s not showing me anything. So I’ve got this nice condensed view. I’m not going to accidentally scroll up and see a bunch of empty space and then realize, oh, that’s right, it’s early in the morning, 2:00 a.m. I don’t need to be looking at that.
Now you may be saying to yourself, well, what if I want to change these times? It’s pretty easy. If you select it, you can actually drag and change these times. So let’s say I want to pull it back to maybe 5:00 a.m. Perfect. Now 12:00 to 5:00 a.m.
On the evening side, I can do the same thing. Maybe I do want to see my evening. I’m going out to dinner or managing other things. I’m going to drag this back to, I don’t know, maybe 10 p.m. All right, so now I still have a condensed version. I’ve opened it up a little bit, but I can always come back and change this.
So I’ve got a nice condensed view by hiding both parts of my morning and parts of my evening.
The next Lab I want to show you, let’s go back to Labs, and we scroll down near the bottom. We have one called Next Meeting. This can be helpful if you want to know at a quick glance how many minutes or hours before your next commitment.
Again, we are going to select Enable, and don’t forget to select Save. We’re going to go back to our screen, and now here in the right-hand side, we get a new view. Here it’s telling me I’ve got a Skype call coming up with my friend Tim one hour and 57 minutes from now.
So just a helpful reminder, maybe I’m not looking at today’s week or even the current month. I’m planning ahead, doing something else. I’ve got a nice convenient view here on the right-hand side. I can see exactly when that next meeting or event is coming up.
I hope you found these tips and tricks helpful. I hope it’s made you a little more productive and efficient within Google Calendar. If you liked this video, I would encourage you to give it a thumbs up. And if you haven’t already done so, please subscribe right here to the Simpletivity YouTube channel. Remember, being productive doesn’t have to be difficult. In fact, it’s very simple.
