Everyone uses a calendar
It doesn't matter if you're a student, a business owner, an employee, or a stay-at-home parent, you've got a calendar to manage.
If you use Google Calendar, sometimes those things and events can get out of control.
So in today's video, I wanna give you some tips and tricks to get your calendar back into control so you can get the most out of your day.
Hello, everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress.
Perhaps your Google Calendar looks like a bit of a rainbow.
Maybe there's a number of different colors, a number of different events, appointments, and engagements.
Reduce the number of calendars you manage
My first tip for you is to ask yourself, how many calendars do you actually need?
Let me explain, here in Google Calendar, one of the benefits is that we can have multiple calendars and by doing so, we can toggle them on or off at any given time.
This can be a great advantage to see just a certain type of events at any given stage.
But far too often, I see that people have way too many calendars, whether it's something that they've subscribed to or calendars that they've shared with others.
My question to you is, how many do you actually need?
For example, I've seen people create a separate calendar just for their baseball practices.
However, those practices just happen two times a week.
Do you really need a separate calendar for something that happens as little as once or twice a week?
You could probably add that to your personal calendar or to some other calendar that also includes those events.
The other nice thing by reducing the total number of calendars that you have to manage is that if you do happen to unable or hide one of these calendars here, and then you won't forget, or at least you reduce your chances of forgetting something that should have been made available to you here, but was actually hidden here on the left-hand side.
So this might be a great time to audit all of the calendars that you've created, or perhaps the ones that you've subscribed to, and actually remove some of them, so you can remove some of the clutter here.
Events are not your only option
My second tip for helping you keep your Google Calendar under control is to keep in mind that not everything needs to be an event.
Often, we're so quick to add things on our calendar that are not necessarily time-specific and really what we're wanting is a reminder instead.
Let's remember that Google Calendar has a reminder function built right in.
The great thing is, is that if you don't acknowledge that reminder, it will carry over into the next day.
So let's say, for example, I want to call someone later this evening.
What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna click on the desire time, I'm gonna click on 7:00 PM.
But instead of creating an event, I'm gonna come over here and select Reminder.
Right away, it's a lot easier because I've got much fewer options to choose from.
I'm gonna say Call Bill in this case and I can make it repeating if I want to, but I'll gonna leave it as is and hit Save.
Now you can see, I've created this reminder for 7:00 PM.
I will receive a notification not only here on desktop but especially on my mobile device, so I can make that phone call.
But if I don't acknowledge it, if I don't check off the reminder, here you can see if I open it up, I can select Mark as done.
If I don't mark it as done, this will carry over into tomorrow and will show as an all day event.
The great thing about reminders is that they don't get left behind.
Keep in mind that reminders do not have to be time-specific.
Maybe there's just something that I'd like to do tomorrow.
All I need to do is click on the all day event area, select Reminder, and I'm gonna say Email Craig regarding the meeting.
It's as simple as that and I can get on with the rest of my day.
Many times, I'll have many more reminders as all day events keeping the rest of my schedule nice and cluttered free.
But again, these won't be left behind because if I don't accomplish it on Thursday, it will automatically transition to the following day.
Customize your notification settings
Now, another great way to get your calendar under control is to change when you receive reminders and notifications.
For example, if I click on this event here, I can see that I'm gonna be notified 10 minutes in advance.
This is the default when you first signed in to your Google Calendar.
However, you can not only change this default to something that is more meaningful to you, you can also change it for the different calendars that you manage right here within Google Calendar.
In order for us to do so, we wanna come up here to the gear icon and select Settings.
On the left-hand side, we first need to start with the calendar in which we want to change those default notifications.
Here I've selected my personal calendar and under Event notifications, I'm gonna say, you know what, I'd rather be notified just a few minutes in advance.
Three minutes is a enough, so I'm gonna leave at three.
I don't have to hit Save or anything else on this screen, it's now gonna be a default of three minutes.
However, if I go to something like my Exercise Calendar, maybe I want a notification further out.
In this case, I'm gonna ask for a 45-minute notification.
You can also add multiple notifications if you like, including email notifications.
So maybe I want to remind myself a full hour and a half via email that I'm gonna be exercising later today, I can do so here as well.
So don't be afraid to change your default event notifications if you find your existing ones are not as helpful as they could be.
Now, if you're dealing with a very busy calendar,
Quickly find the event you're looking for
you're probably also wasting a lot of time because it can be difficult to find that particular appointment that you're looking for, whether it's far into the future, or maybe sometime in the past.
You're probably already familiar with the search feature here in the top right-hand corner.
If we select the magnifying glass, the cursor is ready and waiting for us to input some information.
However, don't forget about the dropdown area here, which will give us some more advanced search options.
For example, we can just search the active calendars, meaning the ones that we've checked on the left-hand side, or we can search all calendars or just a specific subset or a specific calendar.
We can also choose to include a specific keyword, search who is a part of the event or where that event is happening.
We can also eliminate some words but perhaps the most powerful of all is to set a date range or a date spectrum to see where you want to search.
So if you're having trouble finding that particular event, be sure to use the advanced search feature.
Of course, I'm very interested to hear on how you manage your calendar as well.
And if you have tips and tricks to provide to the Simpletivity community.
If so, be sure to include them in the comments down below.
Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult.
In fact, it's very simple.
