Important Google Calendar Features for Business and Professional Users

Google calendar is a very important tool for business and professional users. Beyond that, I also find it as a single and centralized interface between me and all my automation/machines. "How have I set the interface for my personal life?" that can't be covered in this blog. However, will focus on the most important and useful features of Google calendar here to start with.

Here are the features that will explore in this blog.

1. Useful views of the calendar
2. Managing multiple calendars
3. Useful and interesting calendars
4. Recurring events
5. Use of tasks beside calendars for business

1. Useful views of the calendar

Whether it is mobile or desktop we can use some specific views for specific purposes as follows.

First: Week View - This is the most frequent and useful view among all the views.

In this view, we can have a look at the nearby days, also the items are expanded and visible across the current and nearby days in one screen. In contrast in other views, like in day view, you will find that either the current day i.e. today is either too wide where you need to scroll a lot to have an eye on the events also the nearby days are not visible on the same screen. Most of the time nearby days' events are very important to follow to plan and act on today better. And in views like month view, the items are too crowded and small or hidden, difficult to follow easily when you have many calendar entries.

Next: Month View - This is the 2nd most important view I find when I want to have a bird's eye view of my whole month to plan some important day or I want to find anything on the view by its overview.

On the other hand, in the mobile app, I use the Schedule view most. This view can also be expanded to an hourly view by tapping on the date. This is very useful in creating a calendar entry at a specific time quickly. This view may look good to you for desktop as well but creating a calendar entry at a specific time quickly may be an issue with this desktop view. Whereas as explained above in week view you can just click on a blank space of any required date and time on your calendar to create an entry quickly. The best part of the Schedule view is that it shows the entries in a sequential flow.

Apart from the views, the search option is also important and useful when we need to search any specific entry across our calendar. You may also explore how the recurring entries show up in your search result especially.

Also, check out the "Today" button both on desktop and mobile which will help you to navigate quickly to the current date while working with the calendar.

2. Managing multiple calendars

We can have more than one calendar as required. For instance, you want to maintain two calendars for your two separate business lines. Or one for your business and one for your personal use. You can do it from your calendar settings as follows. As you add additional calendars so you find that all the events, meetings, means all the calendar entries are visible in one very useful view. Anytime you can also deselect any calendar if you find that too many items are in your view. Also selecting the proper colours for your individual calendars can help you recognise the items from multiple calendars in view easily.

3. Useful and interesting calendars

Apart from your own calendars, there are some very useful readily available calendars which I use as follows.

Holiday calendar: This shows the holidays in my calendar view beside my own calendar which is very helpful to schedule my meetings and events. You just need to find and enable your desired holiday calendar as per your location and done.

Other calendars like "Moon Phases" and "Sunrise/Sunset" are also interesting to me.

4. Recurring events

Recurring events in Google calendar is great to automate the reminders for recurring activities like AMC renewal, insurance renewal, scheduled recurring maintenance, recurring payments, etc. There are various options while setting up a recurring event using the recurring event option when you create a calendar entry as follows.

Step 1: Start creating a calendar entry, as usual, → Enter the title of the event → Go to more options

Step 2: Select the recurring options → Enter other details, attach documents, as needed for the event → Save

Note the "Custom..." option has many more recurrence types which I frequently find useful.

5. Use of tasks beside calendars for business

Apart from events, a tasks list can also be useful when we have too many things to do in a day for a particular project or work. A task list is a simple list of things to maintain as a to-do list. These are a bit simpler than calendar events and this list is also available in the sidebar of many Google office Apps like Docs, Sheets, Slides, etc.

Also, you can explore the use of reminders for quick reminders. They are very easy to use with Google Home, Assistant, etc. for quick calendar entries.

Next will look into the following option in our Google calendar settings to automatically create a Google Meet link when a calendar entry has been created with guests. We will talk about this in our next blog on communication tools Chat, Groups, and Meet.

Thank you.