Google Calendar for Business: A Detailed Manual for Its Use

It’s nearly impossible to keep everything in mind, and one crucial event should not be overlooked, especially in the busy life of a modern individual, who has much on their mind already. Thanks to the countless applications available, you can safeguard the most important information for you in your smartphone, and when necessary, it can simply remind you about it. Undoubtedly, the most popular and user-friendly application is Google Calendar. It can help anyone effectively plan their day, whether they are a businessperson or a homemaker. Today, we will talk in detail about how to use this application and what makes it particularly special.

Familiarization with Google Calendar

Although human memory can sometimes be astonishing in its capacity, it can also be limiting. You surely cannot remember more than ten events scheduled for today or this week, and that’s especially true when you need to remember specific times. A common situation is this: a specialized application reminds you about a particular event, but you, being too busy at that moment, simply dismiss the notification and successfully forget it. Google Calendar doesn’t allow you to make those kinds of mistakes.

The significant advantage of this calendar is that it is accessible for everyone for free. With its help, you can plan not only your home affairs but also create a more effective work schedule. You can add to the calendar not only the birthdays of your friends and relatives but also information about upcoming meetings and discussions. For people actively spending their time and having a hundred tasks to tackle every week, Google Calendar can become an indispensable assistant.

You can use the application in any browser. For starters, you need to have a Google account. If you don’t have one yet, creating it is quite straightforward.

What’s even cooler is that you can customize your calendar in those shades that you find most pleasant. In the settings section, you need to find the necessary functions. Then, you can choose colors for your working days and important dates. We will discuss this in more detail a bit later.

Business and Google Calendar: How to Use It Effectively

In Google Calendar, you can create different sections for all your tasks and projects. You won’t have to dive into separate folders to keep everything under control.

The calendar features a very interesting function called “Daily Bulletin.” You can enable it, and then at 5 AM every day, you will receive messages listing everything you need to accomplish today. Once a task is completed or canceled, you can remove it from the list or simply hide it for a while.

Adding New Tasks to the Calendar

Creating a new task is quite simple. Just follow this algorithm, and you will definitely get everything right:

1. Go to your calendar and find the “Settings” category.
2. Next, click the “Add” button and then “Create.”
3. Think of a title for the task, and if necessary, add a brief description.
4. Head to the “My Calendars” section. The created task should appear immediately.
5. Then, go to the additional settings category. Here you can set colors and make the task available to everyone who needs it.
6. Finish adjusting the notification settings. For this, you will need to choose on which day of the week, month, or year the event will occur. You will receive a message on your phone at the specified time.

If your calendar is public, and someone changes something in it, you will also receive a notification about it.

After you have set up your calendar, you can add your project plans to it. For example, you have a project that needs to be completed in 10 days, but it constitutes 50 steps. You must divide all these steps by the number of days to ensure you evenly complete the work without overwhelming yourself. Consequently, those steps will be added to the plan every day so that you don’t forget anything. Also, you will receive a notification regarding the need to complete that or another task.

These settings can be changed easily. To do this, just click on the icon of the respective task and uncheck the pencil icon. This function allows you to change the title and description of the task, the time for receiving notifications, and you can also add additional comments to the task.

Let us suggest one more example. Imagine you are a manager, and you need to conduct interviews with several dozens of candidates for a position in your company. You need to distribute the workload, so you take 15 people and split them over 5 working days. For this, you will need to set a new plan. Each day, you will have three interviews, lasting 30 minutes each, which you set reminders for. For convenience, attach the candidates’ resumes to the task. This can only be done if the resumes are sent to you through Google Docs, in PDF format, or as a document created using SweetCV. Thanks to such thorough preparation for the interview, you can conduct it quickly and effectively.

After interviews with candidates, you can immediately mark in the calendar those who impressed you, after which you can hide the task. If you decide to hire someone from them, you can grant task access to colleagues conducting the selection, so they can follow up with them.

Using Google Calendar to Manage Projects

To manage business projects using Google Calendar, you can utilize one of two most convenient methods:

• Create tasks for yourself. As discussed earlier, this method is straightforward. To put it briefly – you divide the task equally over several days, decide when you will receive notifications and also adjust the color scheme if necessary. For each of the projects, you create a new calendar, without any limitations on the number of tasks.
• Provide access to the calendar to others via a shared link. This way, you can give each of your colleagues the same number of tasks, while simultaneously monitoring their completion. Tasks for everyone can be created either in one calendar or in different ones. To make it easier, you should indicate the deadlines and other data right away.

Important notice! Simultaneously, you can add both important dates and project information to your calendar. For instance, you enter all birthdays and other holidays, and they will remain in memory forever. The first described method is ideal for managers while the second is more suitable for workers who can keep track of actions that their managers can follow.

What Else You Can Do in Google Calendar

Google Calendar offers a multitude of interesting functions, and you will definitely want to use them when you first explore this application. Let’s list some functions that might be useful to anyone using Google Calendar for various purposes:

• Import and export. You can find this function in the settings. It includes the ability to attach other calendars or download existing ones.
• The option to print the calendar. If you wish to display the most critical events and plans, for example, on a board in your office, you can print the calendar. This function is also easy to find in the settings.
• Choosing colors. Thanks to a wide color palette, you can highlight every planned date in different shades. One project can have a green color, another – a purple one, while the birthdays of your closest ones can be highlighted in red. Reminders for family or friends’ celebrations are often best left to a week before the event. This way, you will have time to prepare the speech, choose an outfit for the occasion, and generally plan your time.
• Organizing the schedule. This function has emerged quite recently but has already gained many supporters. With it, all scheduled tasks will appear before your eyes not as a calendar, but in the form of a schedule.
• Using templates. If you don’t want to waste your time, you can skip creating a new calendar and take advantage of an existing template. In the settings, you need to select these templates and note the ones you like.
• Choosing a layout. Google’s application usually has 3 theme options for the screen – sport, classic, and lunar phase. You can select the theme you are interested in, for each specific day.
• Integration options. You can place your calendar on a separate page and also access it from various applications. You can learn how to do this in the settings section.
• Settings for other services. You can set up Google Calendar synchronization with your Google Mail, so that you can add letters to your plan.
• Convenient work with gadgets. Depending on what operating system is installed on your smartphone, Google Calendar will work well there. If you, for example, don’t close a particular task, the calendar will remind you of it tomorrow.
• Voice commands. At the beginning, you need to say “OK, Google”, then tell it exactly what you need to remember. The screen of your smartphone will create a task, and you can add it to your plan. This way, no important date will escape you.

An excellent function is working with the application using hotkeys. That is, you don’t need to use a mouse while working with the calendar, just one keyboard will suffice.

How to Work with Google Calendar: A Visual Example

To enhance your understanding of this application, we suggest you outline a plan that simplifies working with it. You can base it on the following:

1. Firstly, you need to outline the project.
2. Then, come up with a short description for it and choose a time for receiving reminders.
3. Distribute all existing tasks by the number of days.
4. Highlight using desired colors those tasks that are important.
5. Every day, control the completion of the existing tasks and hide them.
6. Make adjustments if necessary.

Always strive to write down your thoughts and ideas as soon as they arise in your head. Conversely, you may lose them and never remember again.

In conclusion, I want to reiterate how multifunctional and user-friendly Google Calendar is. The major advantage is that it is freely accessible for all users. Not a single important event will ever slip your mind, as the calendar will certainly remind you about it by sending notifications or alerts at your workplace.

In Google Calendar, you can also find numerous additional functions that simplify your life. For instance, synchronization is available with other applications on any operating system. As soon as you start working with this calendar, you will see how easy and convenient it is, and most importantly – how you can save your precious time.