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Stay Organized With Google Calendar
There’s no doubt that organization improves your efficiency and business prospects. If you’re disorganized, you’re bound to lose
paperwork, miss appointments, and just waste time. Consistently adding your appointments and events lessens the burden on you to
remember everything you need to accomplish in the day.
While picking the right calendar boils down to personal preference and comfort, Google Calendar (GCal for short)
should be strongly considered. Features such as Quick Add make it very easy to update with appointments, while its reminder features,
its task bar, and its calendar shareability make it unique to any other product on the market.
Here are some key pieces of advice to organizing with a Google Calendar:
- Take time to learn the interface
Google Calendar’s help section will take you step by step on how to get started. Just play with it. - Use Quick Add
GCal is very smart. It can parse natural language to add events. Instead of finding a specific day and time and then adding an event, just click “quick add” and type something like “Meeting with the President on Tuesday at 6:00pm and GCal will automatically add it with the right time. - Turn on notifications
A calendar is useless if you don’t check it. However, you can make it easier to check by having GCal send you emails, texts, and pop-ups to remind you of events. I have it set to send me an email 90 minutes before an event and an SMS message a half hour before. You won’t miss meetings with notifications. - Color-code with multiple calendars
You can have more than one calendar within your GCal. Use this feature especially if you’re going to share work calendars or want to separate your personal from your work. Change their colors for easy scanning. - Share calendars with your team
You can add other people to calendars you create, allowing them to add items. Use this to have a collaborative work calendar for your team. - Sync with your phone
Most phones can sync with Google Calendar, including BlackBerries and iPhones. Learn more at Google’s sync help center.
Google Calendar Support by Smugglers Bay!
Google Calendar has three new features in Labs; the features are currently not part of the production calendar, but
can be tried out during this phase. The Labs features can be accessed through the Labs icon once you have signed into your Google
account and gone to the Google Calendar page.
These new features are:
- Event Flair – When this feature is enabled it has 40 icons to choose from to place next to your activities ranging from a piece of cake to an island vacation. After you enable this feature, click on an event and look for the “Event Flair” icon to enable it. Keep in mind that this icon will be visible to all attendees of the event so chose appropriately.
- Gentle Reminders – when this feature is turned on, there will be no annoying pop-ups to interrupt your work. The calendar window or tab would blink to gently remind you of an event.
- Automatically Declining Events – when this feature is turned on, it blocks off time during which you are not available, and automatically declines invitations during this period of time.