Steve Dotto here.
Thanks for spending time with me today.
Today, I want to take you into Google Calendar a little bit and maybe see if I can show you
a few tips that make it work a little better in your life.
For all of us, Web 2.0 calendars like Google Calendar, Yahoo’s Calendar, all of these
shared calendars can be a real benefit because they live on the Internet, and we have access
to them from all of our mobility devices.
They’ve really opened the door for us to be much more organized.
But at the same time, they sometimes confuse the heck out of us as we try and sync our
desktop calendar to our Google calendar to our phone’s calendar, to our phone’s calendar.
So it can be a bit of a challenge but it’s worth the effort to make a system that works
for you.
Personally, I use my Google Calendar at the heart of all of my contacts.
Why?
Because it’s free, because it’s efficient, and because it so far, syncs to everything
else.
Now let me see if I can show you a couple of ways that Google Calendar can add to your
daily productivity.
I’ve got my Calendar up.
The first thing I want to show you is a tool that will help us book meetings, conference
calls, and that sort of stuff far more effectively.
One of the challenges we have is organizing our schedule with multiple others.
We want to set up a conference call and you don’t know what everybody’s schedule is.
You don’t know when they’re free so there’s a lot of back and forth going on often to
book a meeting.
Now if other people are using a web calendar like Google Calendar and they’re sharing
the calendar, there’s an easy way for you to quickly narrow down the meeting options,
at least finding out when people are booked so that they’re not available.
Let me show you how that works.
Let’s say at noon today or just after noon, I need to head to a conference call with some
people.
So I’m going to put in a new agenda item, a conference call, a new calendar item for
me, “Conference call.”
Did I spell it right?
Yay, good Steve.
Now, I’m going to add some guests.
If you aren’t using this feature, if you aren’t adding guests in your appointments
and then having an email and a confirmation coming back from your guests, you’re missing
on a terrific organizational tool.
I think this is one of my favorite parts of the whole calendar, of the whole internet
calendar revolution, the fact that people can create a meeting, invite me to the meeting,
I can accept the meeting, and it automatically populates my calendar.
It’s a terrific way to do those things.
So I’m going to invite Dan into this.
I’m going to invite my buddy, Dan Zimmer, into this.
There’s Dan email address.
I’m going to choose that email address and now look at these option right here, ‘Suggest
times.’
If Dan is using Google Calendar as well and he has his appointments all up on the calendar,
if I click on ‘Suggest times,’ if he has any meetings booked in the time I’m trying
to book, it’ll come up as, “He’s not available,” and so that I can select the
next that he is available that works in my calendar.
This is terrific if you’re working in a team environment where you all use an online
calendar.
It creates more organizational structure that really reduces the amount of back and forth
time you have in booking meetings.
So ‘Suggesting times’ is a worthwhile thing to do as you’re booking your meetings.
Now the next thing I want to show use is–this is turning on and off here–Shared Calendars.
For me, one of the problems that I have is a little bit of information overload.
I’ve got all these different calendars that I quite often have turned on on my desktop
and they’re all important things in my life but sometimes, my schedule can be unbelievably
cluttered.
So what I do is I turn on and off, just by clicking and just by turning them off in the
little tabs here, turning on and off these calendars so that I just reduce it to my calendar
most of the time.
But then if I need to check what time my daughter, say has dance, I just turn on her schedule
and as you can see, she’s got lots of dance lessons but I can see where those overlap
with my other schedule right away so I can turn that on and off.
Reducing the amount of clutter on my desktop, I find, makes me a lot more efficient so I
turn of all of the shared calendars.
But I do like sharing calendars.
It’s not that I don’t like having the shared calendars.
They are terrific for me keeping track of everything that I’m responsible for but
turning them on and off, toggling them on and off is a great way to do things.
Now you noticed that I have multiple calendars that I have access to here.
I’m always amazed with the number of people who aren’t sharing their calendars with
the people that they should be sharing calendars with.
So let me show you where you do that.
I’m in the web browser version of Google Calendar here and if we go into the Settings–you
should always play with your settings in every program you use just to figure what it’s
capable of.
When we go into the Calendar Tab here or the Calendar button, this is where we do a whole
bunch of really useful things.
One of the most useful things we can do with any calendar is we can share it with the important
people in our lives, with our co-workers if it’s a team calendar, with our partner if
it’s a personal calendar.
The ability to share calendars is I think one of the best features.
So all you do to share a calendar is you go into your Sharing Settings and then you can
invite people.
Just by adding their email address, you can invite specific people to share your calendar.
They’re basically subscribing to that calendar.
You don’t have to give them access to make changes although you can do that, but basically
you give them access to your calendar so they can see your schedule.
It’s terrific for busy families where you’ve got a kid’s calendar and each of the parents
can have their own calendar.
That way you can make sure that somebody’s available to take the kids to everything that
they have to be taken to.
There is one other option here in the sharing as well.
You can actually make the calendar public which is great if you’re running a cub scout
troop or if you’re involved in theatre and you need to put the schedule up, that sort
of stuff.
So you can also make calendars public so that anybody can subscribe and you don’t have
to specifically invite them.
So you have a little bit of privacy control there, as well.
Before I leave this screen–actually, I’ve got to go back to that screen because there’s
no Forward and Back.
Here we go back to the screen and into my Settings and back to my calendar.
Before I leave this screen, which I guess I left for a few moments, I want to show you
the notification area here because this is another thing that can really help us out
with staying on track, making sure we don’t miss appointments.
It’s Reminders and Notifications.
What happens here is we can actually choose to either text or email all of our calendars,
our agenda, just before events or just before appointments so that we are always kept on
track.
A lot of us have these sorts of alerts set up in our smartphones already but here we
have the option to have an email or text message sent to us of our daily agenda or any appointments
as they’re coming up.
So that is just another way that it makes us that much more organized.
It keeps us on track.
As far as the short text messaging side, you do have to set up your mobile phone for that
so that you can receive text because, of course, some people are charged for text.
They don’t want to set it up automatically so there’s a permission-based thing going
back and forth.
You choose where you’re from, you choose your carrier, you give them your phone number,
a text will be sent to you, and then you have to reply to that text in order to kind of
enable the entire texting process.
But once you’ve done that, you can receive short text messages of your appointments,
as well.
The last thing that I wanted to show you today is I think one of the real criticisms of the
Google calendaring system is that it doesn’t do a great job of incorporating tasks.
While they don’t do a great job of incorporating tasks especially coming from other areas,
there is the ability to use tasks within it to be able to create tasks.
We have right here the Task Bar which pops out and allows us to have all of our tasks
appear.
Now these things, tasks, I find don’t sync particularly well especially in the Apple
world, with the rest of the Apple task-type applications.
But if you do want to use the Google Tasks, you have the ability here to create tasks.
All you do is you type in a new task.
Oh yes, the plus button here in the bottom.
We create a new task.
We can type in “Pay taxes” because we all need to pay taxes.
That’s a task that goes on and on and it doesn’t stop.
Then you can attach a due date to that particular item and then we see it appears here in the
calendar as an item.
You can, of course, trash tasks from here, you can check them off here as well, and you
can also make multiple lists.
I have, of course, a default list but you can create different lists for different task
categories, as well.
So it does have the ability to create tasks that will remind you in the reminders area.
The only thing that Google Calendar doesn’t really do a good job of here is tying this
sort of a task manager into another, one of the different vertical task managers that
we may be using in the rest of our productivity lives.
But all in all, if we look at the different productivity tools built into a tool like
Google Calendar, we can make our lives that much more efficient.
We can make ourselves that much more productive, and I hope watching this video today has made
you more productive.
Thanks for spending time with me.
If you enjoyed this video, why not give us a like, give us some kudos, we appreciate
that and I look forward to talking to you again sometime soon.
Thanks for joining me today.
I am Steve Dotto.
[END OF VIDEO]
Steve Dotto0Google Calendar Tips0November 12, 2012
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