so we're going to take a look at google calendars new focus time insights and a little bit more
about working hours now this is a feature that is actually locked inside of google suite
and more recently added in the start of november 2021
i actually didn't know this feature existed and sort of got a nudge from a friend
that uh it actually existed so huge shout out to steve rowley for bringing it to my attention
before we begin if you're new here hit subscribe and if you enjoyed this video hit like it'd be
great to have you here in the key productive community so let's start with working hours
now working hours has been a fundamental part of google calendar for some time now and it's a
little bit more flexible than it was which is a great addition you can get google working hours
through going settings general then working hours and location now you can actually enable working
hours through g suite accounts and from here you can set what days and what times you can
work but more recently they've made the ability to change and add new hours so for example let's say
you work between 10 a.m and 4 p.m but then you do an hour in the evening you can add that hour
on a specific day which is really helpful or even use it across the week you can also enable working
location as well now once you've got all that set up you can create something called focus time and
this is actually available when you go ahead and create a new event now when you create a new event
there are a few options you've got event focus time out of office task and appointment slots
so you can actually add more depth to whatever you're adding to your google calendar but let's
hone in on focus time so once you hit focus time you can do a few things during that period of time
you can automatically decline meetings so for example if you wanted to automatic decline
new meeting invitations that helps to block any time for example if you're working on a project or
you're in that meeting focusing on something and you don't want additional meetings to appear you
can also automatically decline new and existing meetings which is something you can either choose
and select now obviously when you automatically decline meetings um maybe some of your team or
other people who are external and might need to know why and you can actually leave a little
message and the one that google also create is actually decline because i'm in focus time but you
could change that to i'm working on the project um hopefully we can organize something soon
now you can naturally add a bit more detail like you would with any on the google calendar event
for example location you can add a description and attachments and even um what at the bottom comes
up you know all the regular settings with default visibility or notify them 10 minutes before
and you can adapt that in your own settings so the third element to this is actually quite
interesting because google have well i felt like they should have been in this market a
very much a long time ago with google calendar but there's something called time insights and
that can be accessed on the left hand side bar this gives you a bit more analytics and insight
into how you're spending your time specifically with for example meetings and focused time
now if you click time insights you get a right hand sidebar and this gives you a bit of insight
into the month that you are working in and it starts with the ability to select your calendar
so you can change what calendar you actually want to find information on you can see how much
focused time has been added how many one-to-ones you've been having and maybe even guests that are
above three in a meeting and also things like um how much time you need to respond to things
and also the remaining time in a week and that's based on your working hours in which you can
actually adjust there so that's really helpful to see a bit of insight into how much extra time you
actually have in your working hours now below you can actually see the time in meetings and
actually breaks it down into recurring or one-time meetings and how much time per month you spend on
meetings now you can also see when you have the most meetings for example you could have the most
of them on thursdays and how your daily average ranks up so for example if you have you know
two hours of meetings on average then that will show that there and update in real time so this
information is really interesting when it comes to being able to pull it together find out a bit more
about how you're working specifically when you're managing um you know your team and things like
that um it actually encroaches on a space that clockwise has been doing really well in innovating
and clockwise has actually been working as i believe like a google workspace partner
uh in creating this more advanced um ai system to analyze how you spend your meetings um and really
give you insights but also help you to channel focus time so if i compare them directly obviously
if i compare them directly obviously initially they're not directly similar i think clockwise
has definitely got much more insight and depth in terms of being able to schedule that but it's
a nice step forward from google and hopefully we'll see more updates like this in the future
anyway folks hopefully you get that anyway folks hopefully that gave a little bit of detail into
how google focus time works let me know in the comments below whether you've been able to play
around with it remember this is currently only available through google suite accounts
so you'd have to be working in a workspace to be able to get access to this sadly you won't
be able to get access to this on your personal google calendar anyway folks a big thank you
please do make sure to like and subscribe this video and i'll talk to you very soon cheerio you