My entire day, nay, my entire life is organized in Google Calendar.
And guess what? I don’t even spend a lot of time in there.
So, I’m going to share with you just how I do it with these 5 time-saving tips for Google Calendar.
Hey friends! I’m Tasia and welcome back to my YouTube Channel where I share tech tips,
app reviews, and a ton of Google Tips. Today, we’re diving back into GCal,
but this time I’m going to show you how to save time in Google Calendar.
So if you’re new around these parts, hello nice to meet you. You can watch a bunch of other Gcal
vids via the link in the description below. But let’s jump into Gcal time-saving tip number 1:
add multiple notifications. This is really helpful if you have an important event coming up.
So, first, when you create an event in Google Calendar, the default notification time is set
to 10 minutes. That’s great and is usually sufficient, but let’s say you have a really
important event coming up and you don’t want to forget about it. So, as an example, if we
click to edit this calendar event, we’re going to have our default 10 minutes prior notification.
But, underneath that, you have an option to add notification. So, you don’t just have to rely on
the default or change a singular notification, you can actually add multiple notifications.
So, let’s click on ‘add notification’ and another notification dropdown appears. Here, you can
select the notification type and you can select how far in advance. So, maybe you want an email
1 week in advance as an additional reminder. And, you can just keep adding notifications by the way,
if you have a bad memory and want to be notified every day leading up to the event,
then go forth and add all the notifications your heart desires.
And speaking of events, the second way to save time in Google Calendar is to add events
from Gmail. This is a huge time-saver.
So, let’s head to Gmail and say you’ve gotten an email asking about meeting up at a certain
time. Well, all you have to do is click on the three dot menu icon near the top of your inbox
and select ‘create event.’ A new Google Calendar tab is automatically opened up for you with the
event details already populated. Now, the meeting title will auto-populate as the subject line of
the email, so you can go ahead and change that if necessary. But, check out how the body of the
email is automatically added to the meeting description, and if the sender specified a
day and time in the email, that will already be populated for you here. How neat is this?
So, of course, you can adjust anything you want, but talk about a time-saver.
Tip number 3 when it comes to saving time in Google Calendar is to quickly search for an
event in Gcal. This is really handy if you can’t remember the details of a past event
or if you want to look for one that’s coming up
but you can’t remember when. Just save time and just search for it!
A lot of you are probably familiar with searching in Gmail for an email, well you can do the same
thing in Google Calendar with events. So, from your gCal, click the search icon in the top right.
A search bar appears at the top, which sure, that’s great and all, but if you click the arrow
in the right of the search bar, you’ll bring up all kinds of advanced search options. So,
you can search in all active calendars, or select a specific calendar to search in. You can add
keywords from the event title, other participants, where the event was, or even rough date outlines,
so if you know it happened in 2021 but you can’t remember when you could add that here. Then just
hit ‘search’ and gCal will bring up any and all events that match those search criteria.
The 4th way you can save time in Google Calendar is to setup and view multiple
time zones. This is the biggest time saver for those of us that work across time zones.
By default, Google Calendar will display the time zone that you’re in. But I’ll show you what my
personal and work calendars look like and you’ll notice, I’ve got two time zones set up, but also
have a few different clocks on the left-hand side of my Gcal. If you click on the settings gear icon
in the top right and then select settings, you can then click on ‘time zone’ on the lefthand side.
So, right away, you’ll notice those defaults I was talking about. So, you’re primary timezone
and that your timezone will update to your current location. But here, you can toggle on a secondary
timezone. Now, here, you’ll be able to select an additional time zone from the dropdown menu
and you can even label the timezone however you’d like. So now, back in our Google Calendar,
you’re going to have your local timezone but you’ll have your secondary timezone set here too.
Now you may be wondering, well, how come that doesn’t look like the
3 timezones on the left that you showed me? Don’t worry, there’s another setting for that.
To display the three time zones like I showed you, you’ll need to toggle on that particular
calendar view. And you do so by just clickling on the hamburger menu icon in the top left. So,
now we’ve got my two time zones, but we also have three timezones displayed on
the left hand side of my Gcal. So, to get these setup, head to your settings again.
And this time, click on world clock. Here, you can add as many time zones as you’d like, and these
are what will display on the very lefthand side of your Gcal, providing you with a quick snapshot of
the times in those locations, without you having to leave Google Calendar. Such a time saver.
And this brings us to tip number 5 to save time in Google Calendar, and that’s to change the default
meeting length. It sounds silly, but this can definitely save you time in Google Calendar.
So you know how if you click on a block of time in Gcal, a new event edit will appear? Well,
by default this is set to 1 hour. So, if you find yourself constantly having to change the default
length of a meeting to 30 minutes or an hour and a half, you can actually just change this
default so you don’t have to adjust it every single time you create a new event. Just head
to your settings again, and this time select event settings on the left. Here, you can change the
default duration time. But, cooler yet, you can also toggle on something called speedy meetings.
This will allow you to end 30 minute meetings 5 minutes early and longer meetings, 10 minutes
early. So now, when you go to create an event, you’re going to notice that Gcal automatically
shaves off that time from the event, if you have speedy meetings toggled on. Pretty neat.
Alright, it wouldn’t be true to form if I didn’t include a little bonus tip for ya. Quickly change
the event color in Google Calendar. Listen, every click of the mouse is valuable time, so if
I can save you a click or two, you’re welcome.
So, you’ll notice how I’m a big color coder when it comes to my calendar blocking in Gcal.
So, you can set the color of an event when you are creating it of course, but what if you
want to change an existing event after it’s made. Instead of clicking on the event and then clicking
the edit option, and then selecting the new color, just right-click on the event, and boom, pick your
desired color. Extra mouse clicks be darned. You can also quickly delete an event like this too.
So let me know what your favorite time-saving Google calendar tips are. It’s hard for me to
pick, but it’s probably a toss-up between the time zones and quickly searching for an event. And
remember, there’s a bunch of other Google Calendar tips via the links in the description below.
So that’s how to save time in Google Calendar and now I want to hear
from you. What do you think of these tips? Let everyone know in the comments below. As always,
thank you so much for watching. If you liked this video, then I want to know! Give it a like,
a share, or leave that comment below. You can click right about here to subscribe to my Channel
and here and here for even more Google Calendar tips. Thanks for watching, see ya next time.