- So, you don't like the default seven day view
that comes with the Google Calendar?
You could uncheck Show Weekends,
but five days is still too much.
You press X to show four days,
but four is an unlucky number in some areas.
So, you use your mouse,
highlight across for a three day view,
or a two day view.
Or, pro tip, if you have multiple calendars,
selecting one day will split those schedules
within a single day.
Let's get started.
Hi, friends, welcome back to channel.
If you're new here, my name is Jeff.
Come for the calendar tips and stay
for the somewhat cringey hypothetical scenarios.
In this video, I'm going through
new Google Calendar features for productivity,
browser extensions that make our lives even easier,
and tips specific to Google Workspace users.
Diving right into tip number two.
Under calendar settings, you might already have
a secondary time zone setup,
but now you can add a label
and have it reflect in your default view.
Oh, and for all the haters from my last video;
West coast best coast?
Nah.
East coast, beast coast.
By the way, I highly recommend
you enable keyboard shortcuts.
Under Settings, Keyboard Shortcuts,
Enable Keyboard Shortcuts.
I'm gonna be using shortcuts throughout this video.
Trust me, it makes things so much easier.
GCal tip number three.
If you don't like the default color options
that come with your calendar,
head on over to colorhunt.co,
and select a color palette that you like.
I've always enjoyed their pastel collection.
Click into one, and then click again to copy the hex code.
Back to Calendar.
Click the Add custom color, here, and replace the hex code
after the pound hashtag side, and click Save.
Google Cal tip number four.
If an email thread is going absolutely nowhere,
you can click the three dots within that email,
and click Create event.
Google Calendar will immediately pull
your email subject line, make it the title,
add everyone in the to and cc fields,
and even create a Google Meet link.
All you have do, is to update the time and date,
and clean up the description because, by default,
all the content from the email thread
will be displayed here.
Google Calendar hack number five.
If you have a personal account and a work account,
it's very helpful to share your personal calendar
with your work one.
This way you can add, delete, modify events,
all from one Calendar view.
In this case, a blue event is for work,
and visible to my colleagues.
If I select my personal account, it shows up in purple,
and is not visible to anyone else.
To enable this, press S to go to Settings,
Settings for my calendars, Share with specific people,
Add people, type in your corporate account email, here.
For permission, since it's with myself,
I choose the highest level access,
Make changes and manage sharing, and click Send.
You then accept in your work account,
and now you have both Calendar views.
By the way, I take absolutely no responsibility
for any breakups that might occur
from one partner requesting
the calendar access of another.
Calender tip number six.
If you're the owner of the event,
but you're going out of office,
click in three dots, Change owner,
type in the email of the new owner,
and click Change owner.
As brown-nosing as this might sound,
if you're transferring to another internal team,
summarize the Google Calendar meetings that you own,
list the corresponding new owners,
and remind them to accept the transfer.
Doing this will win you brownie points.
You never know when you're gonna come
across your previous teammates again.
But if you're leaving the company, (beep) it.
Nah, just kidding; it's a small world, you never know.
By the way, if you're enjoying these tips,
let me know by dropping a like,
and feel free to sign up for my no-bullshit
Productivity Ping newsletter.
Link down below.
Shout out to Ayoub for tip number seven.
And that is, if you add someone's birthday
to the Google contacts app on mobile or on web,
it will automatically show up under the birthdays calendar.
This brings us to tip number eight, which is,
if you go to Settings by pressing S,
Import & export; and click Export,
you can now export all your calendars,
including birthdays from Google contacts in a zip file.
If you wanna share the birthday dates
with lazy friends or family, simply unzip the file,
and have them upload the birthdays .ics file
by clicking here in the Import section,
selecting the file, and clicking Import.
Of course, birthdays is a very specific use case.
More relevant examples
might be team vacation calendars at work;
you wanna share it with new joiners,
or extracurricular meetings at school
and a new student joins the group.
Google Calendar tip number nine.
Under settings for your calendar, Event notifications.
You might have already customized
your settings for this part,
but I highly recommend you take it a step further
and add All-day event notifications as well.
For me, birthdays are the most frequent all day events
on my calendar.
I'm such an angel.
So I usually add a notification for zero days,
which is the day of the birthday, at 9:00 AM,
so I can be the first to wish them a happy birthday.
Of course, if I were really a good friend,
I would set this for a week before,
so I can prepare a birthday present.
That's way too much work.
GCal feature number 10 is a quickie.
If you delete an event by mistake,
click the Settings icon here,
Trash, select Restore, or Delete forever.
All right, onto two useful extensions.
First is a button for Google calendar.
Three things I like about this one.
First, after you pin the extension,
the icon shows the number of hours
until your next meeting.
And hovering over it shows the title of that event.
Second; clicking into it, minimalist design.
You see at a glance, all upcoming events.
And third, this is my favorite,
for all meetings with a Google Meets invite,
clicking the camera icon
brings you straight to the video conference.
Very helpful if you're running late.
Not that any viewer of this channel would ever be late,
especially not me.
Tip number 12, the second extension, gCal plus.
There are a few features I use here,
but I'm gonna highlight two.
First is the time of day that's visible
In my calendar view.
I have 5:00 AM to 11:00 PM here.
So, as you can see everything before 5
and after 11, is cut off.
Second, Show Titles on Hover.
This is helpful when you're in month view.
Press M for month view.
And you hover over a long title, and the full title pops up.
Okay, so the next three functions
are mainly for Google Workspace users.
Fingers crossed, they'll come to the rest of us
at some point.
If you find out otherwise,
please let me know down in the comments.
Workspace Calender tip Number 13
is the ability to give others the option
to add your invite to their calendar.
So, for example, let's have a big presentation coming up.
Click in three dots, Publish event,
and now can copy the link to this event,
and hyperlink it in an email, for example.
And now, the recipients can choose to save this event
in their calendar, if they want to.
It's important to know that any update you make
to the original event will not reflect
in other people's calendars if you use this method.
So, you wanna make sure every detail is correct
before you publish the event.
Workspace tip number 14.
For meetings with two or more attendees,
you'll be able to create meeting notes
directly from the event description,
and have that Google Doc linked to that meeting,
so all attendees automatically have access
to the same document.
I have an entire video
on the Smart chips feature within Google docs.
So, check out that video if you haven't already.
Google Calendar tip number 15.
Very relevant for remote and hybrid work, moving forward.
And that is, you can RSVP to a calendar invite
with your location.
In the email notification or the calendar invite itself,
next to yes, you can let others know
whether you'll be joining physically
in a meeting room, or virtually.
Google definitely has good intentions with this feature,
but somehow, somehow I have a feeling
that some people will use this feature
to avoid certain colleagues in the office.
Bonus tip.
Okay, not really a tip, but more of an aesthetics thing,
but I add emojis to the titles of recurring events
just to spice things up.
Actually, drop the calender emoji down below
if you're still watching, so I know who's cool.
If you found these helpful,
I think you'll enjoy my original Google Calender video.
So, check that out.
See you on the next video.
And in the meantime, have a great one.