8 Google Calendar Tips You Probably Didn’t Know!
99% of us use Google Calendar in some way or fashion. But are we using it as productively as possible?
In this article, I share 8 Google Calendar Tips for Productivity for intermediate and advanced users of this amazing tool. There are so many gCal tips and little-known features suited for various scenarios that only a productivity nerd would be able to uncover and share, them all. Not only will we go through how to use some of these google calendar features for specific situations, but I’ll also go through keyboard shortcuts that will save you tons of time in the long run.
You’ll learn simple setting tweaks such as display the World Clock and Secondary Time Zones on Google Calendar, as well as more advanced settings such as how to combine Gmail filters with invisible calendar events to make sure you never miss an important action item again!
· Tip 1 — Create new event quickly
· Tip 2 — Change default reminder time
· Tip 3 — Grant modify rights by default
· Tip 4 — Display multiple time zones
· Tip 5 — Add Invisible Events
· Tip 6 — Gmail filters with Calendar events
· Tip 7 — Receive daily agenda
· Tip 8 — Advanced Calendar search
· Bonus Tip!Tip 1 — Create new events quickly
To add something to your calendar quickly, all you have to do is type cal.new in your address bar. It’s that simple! This is really helpful if you want to create an event, but you don't have Google Calendar open, so, instead of manually opening Google Calendar and clicking new event, you can press Ctrl + t or Cmd + t on your browser and use the address above to pull up a new calendar event. It also works on all browsers!
As a bonus, if you type doc.new, slides.new and sheets.new, you are going to open Google Docs, Google Slides, and Google Sheets respectively.
Tip 2 — Change default reminder time
The second advanced tip is to change your default reminder time to 2 minutes instead of 10. I’ve personally found that being notified 10 minutes before an event doesn't do much, because I will have already forgotten about the event by the time it started, especially when we’re all working from home. So, what you can do is:
- Head over to your calendar homepage.
- Click Settings in the top right corner, or press S for the Settings shortcut.
- On the sidebar, find My Calendars and click on the one you want to modify.
- Click on Event Notifications and change when and how many notifications you get.
I personally found two minutes to work for me. When I see the two-minute notification, I wrap up what I’m doing right now and head straight over to the next meeting.
Tip 3 — Grant modify rights by default
This is a huge pet peeve for a lot of people. Your calendar invite should by default be modifiable by others. Let me show you what I mean.
In the settings menu, go to the general tab, click on events settings, and for the default guests permissions, make sure the ‘modify event’ selection is checked.
This essentially means, if the time slot doesn’t work for the person you sent the invite to, they can change it to a new time without having to text you to change the time. All that is a waste of time.
Even if you have a huge event with a lot of attendees and you don’t want anyone to edit the event by mistake, you can simply uncheck the modify event option for that specific event.
Tip 4 — Display multiple time zones
The last of the easy ones and very relevant to this new virtual normal we find ourselves in is multiple time zones in your calendar for easy scheduling across regions. To activate that you can:
- Head over to your calendar homepage.
- Click Settings in the top right corner, or press S for the Settings shortcut.
- Go to General, then world clock
- Click show world clock and add any time zone you want.
And as a bonus, you can enable a secondary time zone right on your calendar, so you can see exactly what time it is when you send the invite over.
Tip 5 — Add Invisible Events
Add invisible events that only you can see, so you still seem available to others. This could be a reminder to drink some water or take a quick stretch, while still showing as available to others.
When you create a new event, head over to the visibility section. Make sure the first dropdown is set to free, and change the second one from default visibility to private.
Now you have a calendar event that only you can see.
Tip 6 — Email notifications for calendar events
Tip number six is an extension of tip number five. It’s very useful if you have recurring events, every week or every month.
For example, let’s say I have this invisible calendar event that reminds me to write snippets every Tuesday by the end of the day.
While you can choose to just receive a calendar notification for this important reminder. It’s probably more reliable if you choose the email notification option here instead.
You can find this option when creating a new event, in the notifications section, there is a dropdown where you can choose to receive a notification or an email.
Tip 7 — Receive daily agenda
For those of you who might not have the habit of checking your schedule for the next day, this is an excellent way for you to see your current day schedule at a glance.
- All you have to do is go to your settings menu
- Go to settings from my calendars
- Click your calendar
- Go to event notifications,
- Under other notifications, select email for daily agenda.
And now you receive an email every day at 5:00 AM with that day's schedule.
Tip 8 — Advanced Calendar search
If you thought Google search was the only place for you to satisfy your need to search for something every day, you’d be wrong, because there are some pretty fancy search features built right into Google Calendar.
In the calendar homepage, click the magnifying glass to bring up the search bar and click the dropdown arrow to bring up the events filters.
Here we can filter by keywords like who attended the event, where it took place, and the date range if you can’t remember the specific date but you still want to refer to notes or agenda items from that calendar invite.
Bonus Tip!
If you’re using Google Calendar at work or for school, there’s a good chance that you have a lot of contacts on the left-hand side of your calendar.
They can get pretty annoying if you have to search for one person’s calendar over and over again, like your manager or your professor.
What you can do is click on the three dots here and go to the settings and change the name of the calendar to place them on top, since Google Calendar orders these names alphabetically.
You can use an asterisk or an underscore to easily get them at the top of the list.
What’s fun is, you can head over to emojipedia.org and search for an emoji that reminds you of that person. That will also place them at the start of the list while adding some personality to your calendar.
Please let me know down in the comments which one of these tips you enjoyed the most.
For me, the time zone one was actually a game-changer because I’ve so many meetings across different regions.
Hope you found this helpful.
