As a business owner, chances are you have a lot going on in your day. Between running your day-to-day business, keeping track of finances, maintaining a social life, hitting the gym and fitting in sleeping somewhere in there – it’s safe to assume life is hectic.
We’ve been old school pen to paper when it comes to maintaining our planners, something about physically putting a line through one of your ‘to do’s’ is just so satisfying. And although we aren’t giving up our old ways, we’ve been recently using Google Calendar as a way to keep our day organized. Let us be the first to tell you, it’s a game changer.
Google Calendar can be used for many things – you can add your appointments, input tasks, give yourself reminders, all while colour coding everything into categories. It’s an organized junkies dream!
As the year comes to an end, the days seem to feel shorter with all that we have to get done. Google Calendar makes it easy to plan out our days and organize the weeks to come to ensure we are maximizing our day and getting sh*t done!
We swear this isn’t sponsored, just super fans of the app. We’re here to share 6 ways you can optimize your Google Calendar:
1. Colour Coding
We kind of touched on this already but to get real specific, let’s get into it. During your day you have a mix of business which could include meetings, to do’s, shifts and you have personal, which includes things like social time, working out, self-care etc… All those things are important items to add to your calendar but if you make them all one colour, it’s easy to get lost and overwhelmed. On Google Calendar you can make each ‘category’ its own colour. With one quick glance, you can easily see how your week is balanced out.
2. Notifications
As two entrepreneurs who are still living that ‘one-screen-life’, it can be annoying to constantly toggle back and forth between tabs to see what’s coming next on our calendar. Probably the reason we’ve always stuck to physically writing things in our planners. Google Calendar allows you to play with your notifications for upcoming events in your calendar – our favourite: it literally takes over your screen as you are working to let you know in x amount of minutes (whatever you have it set to) this task/reminder/event is next, which you then have to ‘close’ it. It might seem annoying, but you can have the peace of mind while you work that you won’t miss an upcoming event.
3. Change your view
This may not seem like a ‘wow’ feature for Google, but it’s honestly super helpful. Google Calendar allows you to quickly toggle between different views – whether that’s to your day, week or month, you can quickly see what you have going on during that time. You can also change your main view to only show your working week (Monday to Friday) or include the weekends. It’s totally yours to customize.
4. Adding Facebook events
This takes a little back end work, but it’s super convenient when you do it. If you are someone that gets invited to or goes to a lot of events through Facebook, this integration is for you! In Facebook, go to your Events page and then where you see Upcoming Events – click on import and a download will appear. When you go into your Google Calendar, click Settings and Sharing, and from the Import and Export option, click Import. You’ll now see your Facebook invites in your calendar.
5. Daily agenda
THIS is a game changer. For those of you who are morning e-mail people, we got you! Getting in the habit of checking our Google Calendar comes with time – it’s not the first thing we do right in the morning (slowly but surely, making it a habit). And same goes with our physical planner, we don’t sleep with it at our bed side. But something we do do every morning is check our e-mail. In settings through your Google Calendar you can have it so your daily agenda (that days events) is sent to you, via email, every morning at the same time – talk about convenience!
6. Add Tasks to your Calendar
To make your life easier, Google Calendar has integrated a Tasks section and we love it. Since we’ve been optimizing our calendar, we’ve blocked out hours in our day for working hours. During those hours, we get a lot done – and though we still love writing our lists on paper, Google Calendar makes it super easy to keep everything in one place. Along the right side of your calendar, you can create a list of tasks to get done which you can also check off/remove once they are complete. This gives you a clear, updated visual of what you need to get done that day.
Don’t get us wrong, we love filling up the pages of our cute Indigo planners and although we probably won’t get rid of them, we’ve been using Google Calendar more and more – and love it! It’s made our life so easy to have everything in one place and share it with each other as business partners. If you want to maximize your days and stay organized (and sane), we suggest creating a Google Calendar if you haven’t already and trying out these tips!
We are still finding new ways to optimize our calendars – what are some things you do to stay organized and plan out your days?
Comments