Did you know that Google Calendar can dual as a productivity tool that helps you stay organized? Gmail’s Google Calendar is one of the most commonly used digital calendar options available and it’s so easy-to-use. Also, this calendar platform provides numerous tools and functionality designed to help you prioritize and organize all aspects of your life from personal to professional.

Tips to Stay Organized with Google Calendar

Create Multiple Calendars

WIth so many responsibilities, cramming everything into a single digital calendar will get messy fast. Not just that, but sometimes calendars need to be segmented for different purposes in order to avoid confusion. Thankfully, Google Calendar gives you the ability to maintain multiple calendars. You can create as many calendars as you’d like for professional and personal purposes.

Calendar organization ideas:

  • Have a calendar that lists all of your personal appointments such as an upcoming visit to the dentist, dinner with a good friend, yoga, or soccer practice.
  • Bills. Keep track of all of your bills on a calendar that helps you manage your upcoming expenses such as rent, cell phone bill, student loans, car payments, and insurance.
  • Vacations. Create a calendar for upcoming vacations with friends or family. You can even add other users to the meeting invitation and keep them in the loop by updating the agenda onto the invite.
  • Blog Schedule. Running a blog and looking to schedule out content? Give yourself a high-level overview with a dedicated calendar. You can insert outlines into events and drag topics around to decide final posting dates.

Hide or View

A convenient functionality of Google Calendar is that on the left hand corner you’ll notice you can easily tick or untick a checkbox to show or hide the calendar’s information. View all calendars at once to see if there is any conflicting overlap or toggle on one at a time in order to get a clean view of the calendar you wish to see.  

Syncing Capability

The great thing about Google Calendar is that it seamlessly updates any changes made on a device across all devices. Made a change on your desktop to an address change for an upcoming concert venue while you were at work? No worries. The address you access from your mobile device later will be the one you updated on your computer. Google Calendar has mastered the art of syncing data and makes it easy for you.

As plans change and information is revised or deleted, it will conveniently show up in real-time on your Google Calendar.

Share Your Calendars

Google Calendar lets you share any and all of your multiple calendars with other people. You can invite users to view or edit your calendars by adding them via email. Since you are the calendar creator, you have full capabilities or deciding how much access or restrictions you want to give to users.

For example, if you have an assistant or a colleague that needs scheduling permissions to your calendar, you can give them permission to update your availability and book appointments on your behalf.

You can also add a friend’s or colleagues calendar by requesting permission.

The benefits of sharing calendars:

  • Multiple editors. If you’re working at a startup or on a big team that has a ton of projects, meetings, and deadlines a shared calendar can be managed and updated by several members on the team.
  • Working off one master calendar helps avoid scheduling conflicts and gives the users full visibility of what’s going on within the group or organization.
  • Communication.Sharing a calendar with your team creates transparency and establishes a cadence of visibility and trust with your colleagues or friends. Chances are you started a calendar to keep a project or goal on track and keeping things in plain sight helps everyone.

Meetings and Availability

Some calendars out there are a bit tedious when it comes to scheduling a meeting. You usually have to add each attendee by name and then check each individuals availability to ensure that the desired time slot works for everyone.

This can be frustrating when you want to be as tech-savvy as possible and cut down the time it takes to do tasks such as setting up a meeting.

Thankfully Google Calendar can save you a ton of time and pinpoint a time that works best for you and your team

Using the “Find a Time” tab on your coworkers’ calendars enables you to organize meetings while the reminder alerts keep you on target for where you need to be at what time. These alerts can be set 60-to-90 minutes in advance of an event.

Also, Google Calendar allows you to invite guests through the calendar platform rather than emailing them. You can receive automated RSVPs and add the location or meeting details to the event.

To-Do Lists

Google Calendar is also a fantastic source for organizing everything you need to prioritize in the form of lists. The “Tasks” tab makes it easy to create and manage a “to-do” list. Your task lists will also sync up across all devices. For example, if while you were at work you created a grocery list on your work computer then you could easily access that list from your mobile device later in the day.

You’ll be able to see past tasks, tasks that have been marked as complete, and  unchecked tasks that let you know what still needs to be done on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

Color Coding

Even with multiple calendars and access to others’ calendars, it can still be daunting to remain organized. That’s why Google Calendars introduced its color coding system.

No need to bust out the neon color highlighters or post-its when it comes to color coding. Google Calendars lets you color code by calendar and lets you color code events, meetings, and projects.

For example, you can color code all your expenses on your ‘Bills Calendar’ to come up as green so you know that means money. Yellow can be reserved for vacations, red for emergency projects or appointments, and blue for work. The color coding possibilities are flexible and yours to customize.

Color coding makes scanning calendars to locate exactly what you’re looking for so much easier.

Integration

Having many of your productivity tools in one place can also increase organization. Google Calendar integrates with tons of applications that are effective for time tracking, scheduling, accounting, invoicing, and sales and marketing.

The more tools you integrate with your Google Calendar, the faster you can accomplish daily tasks. A great time-saving technique to help you ramp up your organization workflow even more.

There’s no time like right now to be more organized.

About the Author:

John Rampton is an entrepreneur, investor, and startup enthusiast. He is founder of the calendar productivity tool Calendar