Today we are talking about Google Calendar
because I've been getting a lot of questions
about how I use my calendar personally
and Google calendar has been my weapon-of-choice
for the past five, six, seven years almost to this point.
So, today in this video, we're gonna go through
how I use Google Calendar, some of the tips and tricks I use
both on desktop and mobile, how I used it as a student
versus now as an incredibly professional businessman,
and hey, if you guys use a different calendar,
most of the stuff is going to apply, not all of it,
but for the vast majority of it, it's gonna apply to
any calendar you use, so iCal, Outlook Calendar,
I don't know, like a stone tablet on the ground,
that one's gonna be a bit of a stretch, but this will apply
to almost any system for the most part.
The first thing I need to stress here is that
Google Calendar is part of what I call
my quick capture system.
Now, I'm gonna talk about this concept a little bit more
in a future video, but essentially, the gist of it
is that quick capture means you want to get ideas
of any kind out of your head as immediately as possible
and into a system that you trust, one that has context,
one that's organized, and one that will either notify you
when you need to know about it again in the future
or that you trust yourself to check regularly.
So, with that being said, we're gonna get into
how I specifically use Google Calendar in my daily life
and I need to split this explanation in two
because the way I use it today is very different
than how I used it as a student.
As a student, I had my calendar split into multiple
different calendars because the concept essentially for me
was to split my life into different components
and then be able to look at each component individually.
So, I had specific calendars for classes, for work,
for on-campus events, I also had one for other stuff,
just kind of things that didn't fit, and I also had
a professor office hours calendar.
By the way guys, if I sound like a frog right now,
it's because I'm sick, sorry.
One last thing about how I used my calendar as a student
is that at the beginning of every semester,
I would put in all the important dates right away
so like the date when I needed to sign up for classes
for the next semester, that would go in right away,
finals week would go in there, and that way,
I knew it was all set up at the beginning of the semester.
I wouldn't have to be worrying about when do I sign
up for classes, when do I start studying for finals,
it's all set up initially and then I can just react to it
as it comes up on a week-to-week basis.
So, that brings us to today where I use my calendar
in a very different manner and that's because I'm no longer
a student and my time isn't dominated mostly by events.
I'm a business owner and most of my time
is kind of free form, I can choose to work on whatever
I want to work on at any time as long as it gets done.
I would say probably about 90% of my time is like that.
The other 10% is scheduled meetings for the most part
because as a podcaster, I'm often interviewing people
or I'm being on other people's shows.
The other main use is for travel since I'm going to
schools to speak sometimes, or I go to conferences
that are in different cities and different states,
I'm often traveling and when I travel,
I create all day events in the calendar so they're not
blocking up the hourly slots and that way I just know oh,
I'm in Denver these days, I'm in New York City these days.
The last main thing I use my calendar for these days
is for exercise because a lot of my exercise is actually
event-driven like my yoga class is 6:30pm on Thursdays,
so I gotta be there on time and for ice skating practice,
it's only a very limited window of time every day
that I can do it, so I just schedule it on the calendar
and then because I'm a completionist,
I put my gym time on there as well.
So, with those explanations out of the way,
I've got a few more things to talk about,
first of which is mobile.
Now, I used to use Sunrise Calendar on my iPhone
to manage Google Calendar because it was free
and it was beautiful and at the time,
the Google Calendar app kind of stunk in my opinion.
That is not the case anymore, I think the
Google Calendar app is pretty good, however,
I don't use it because now I use an app called Fantastical.
The reasons I use Fantastical is number one, it is the best
calendar app that I have found for use on the Apple Watch
right now because it's the one that has glances,
so I can just easily look at the watch, swipe up and see
what my next event is, and it also has absolutely
fantastic natural language processing which means
if I use voice dictation to create an event which is a
really seamless, frictionless way to get it out of my brain
and into my phone, then it will intelligently pick out
the parts of the event that need
to be put in different fields.
And that brings me to the last thing we need to talk about
in this video which is scheduling stuff because
email tag is the worst, trust me, I've got like
50 message-long threads from a few years ago
where I'm trying to be like yeah, I'm available this day,
oh you're not available that day, blah, blah, blah.
You can use technology to make this much, much simpler.
Now, the app that I use on a regular basis is called
Calendly and this is an app that lets you define
certain dates and times on your weekly schedule
when people can basically pencil in their
own appointments with you and this is really, really useful
for people like me who are podcasters and have to
schedule interviews a lot, or maybe people like tutors,
anyone who has to open up big amounts of their schedule
in limited windows to let people basically pencil in
their own appointments, but I don't think it's super
useful for students because you guys usually have a lot
of your schedule already spoken for by classes
and you're generally just trying to schedule things like
group project work time.
Now, Google Calendar has their own find-a-time feature,
but what I found is most students don't have their
calendar game on lock, so you're gonna be like
the only person who has everything really nicely scheduled
and everyone is gonna be like yeah, I don't know
what I'm doing next Tuesday.
So, Doodle is what I recommend for you guys
because Doodle basically lets you define a date range
and then everyone can vote on the times that work for them
and you can easily see the column
where everyone's available.
So, that about does it for this video.
Now, if you've been paying attention, you are now a
scheduling ninja though, do not put that in your Twitter bio
or I will find you, and if you guys have extra tips about
how to use your calendar that I didn't cover here,
I would love to hear them otherwise,
thank you so much for watching.
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And in last week's video, we talked about skipping classes
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And lastly, if you want to connect,
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Thanks for watching.