Article Summary: The less we make it clear to ourselves about how our time is going to be invested, the more we are to find ourselves surprised by the things we did/didn’t do. This article is written to help you understand your time more clearly via your Google Calendar.

 

Introduction

 We all have only 24 hours in a day, and with that 168 hours in a week. Long as you’re human, and trying to succeed in any endeavors to survive and thrive, chances are you follow some form of structure to your time of life. And due to the complexity of that structure, the human race has put together a number of tools to help stay organized as to what we have to do and when. Notably, one of those tools is Google Calendar. 

Today I want to share 3 tips on how you can make use of Google Calendar in ways you may have not already thought to do so. If by sharing these tips, you suddenly find yourself needing one less productivity tool, missing one less important life event, or if your eyes just hurt less from looking at your calendar overall, I’ll call that a win. All that being said, this article is meant to be practical. Please try out these tips as you read!

I’m going to start by showing you how to take advantage of a somewhat invisible feature that is the All-Day Calendar Blocks. Specifically, we’re going to use this feature as a super quick To-Do List feature! Second, we’re going to take advantage of the fact that we can right click on any calendar block and quickly assign a color to it, 1 of 11 with Google Calendar. From these colors, we’ll create our own color-coding system.

 

Finally, I’m going to invite you to do something a bit tedious, yet effective in enhancing self-reflection. This tip involves creating an entirely new calendar which has no planned events – instead it will only hold events that actually occurred, kind of like a journal of calendar blocks. Of course, Google Calendar wasn’t really designed to be use this way, and the process can be quite tedious, but trust me, the reward is worth it.

 

Let’s begin:

 

Google Calendar Trick #1: Using the All-Day Blocks As a To-Do List Feature

So I first learned to use this Google Calendar trick while working for a small private clinic. At this clinic, the entire team shared a main calendar, which held the schedule of all incoming patients. While we already had tools to automate patient scheduling and take it out of our hands, I at least found it brilliant how the team operated its To-Do’s from the top of the main calendar. The above image illustrates how this is done…  

 

See, I was very much impressed by the urgency of everyone to complete the tasks which were left into the “all-day calendar block” section of this main Google Calendar. On the one hand, I loved the accountability aspect, but as well, I really liked all the other things you could do with that block in order to really make it actionable by adding the little extra detail and step in naming, color-coding, and scheduling the block. 

More on that in the next trick.

First, here’s why using the All-Day Block Feature as a To-Do List is really powerful:

1. You can always drag and drop any all-day block to another day with ease. This way, if you see your plate is full on the actual schedule for a particular, you can just move a task over to another day. Of course, pay mind that this kind of moving should only go on for so long before you have to stop putting the task off, but at least you’ll be mindful of moving a task over repeatedly while adding/prioritizing new or other blocks.

2. You can “assign” people via their email. While normally you add people to Calendar events in order to schedule meetings, who’s to say you can’t do the same to assign them to task-focused events? With that in mind, you can always email all those assigned to a block directly from the block, and that’s just two clicks away: One on the block, another on the email icon, which brings you directly to a new mail window.

3. Perhaps most beneficially to setting the intention/expectation to work on a task, you can go to the edit details section of an event block and use the “Find a Time” feature. This feature opens up a view that looks at your schedule and shows you in which places during your schedule you can fit time in for the To-Do. And so, from a few not so visible Google Calendar’s feature set, there’s a lot you can do to manage time and task.

While features are great to use as we see best fit, in the end we need to rely on our own system for labeling events. The next tip covers just that.

Google Calendar Trick #2: Color-Coding Time Blocks

Now then, even if you’re using the all-day section of Google Calendar to manage your must-get-done tasks of each day, you really ought to get these “all-day” tasks into your actual schedule. This is critical, because it sets aside real time to actually work on the tasks. If you don’t do this, then what’s to prevent something else from getting your attention and keeping you from doing what you needed to set aside time to do?

Whether you use the “Find a Time” feature mentioned above, or just create a copy block off the all-day blocks you’ve got floating above, the question then becomes… How do you avoid creating the kind of calendar you see below? By the way, the reason you may want to not turn your “all-day” tasks into blocks on your actual schedule is so that you “save” a top view of what got done on a given day. Try that and see how it goes .

Yeah, this is hard to look at. Don’t worry, good news is you can just right click each block, and now there’s an entire palette of colors to choose from, but hold on… This presents a key opportunity to do something smart. Let’s consider how we can use these colors well. For example:

What if we designated the different colors to represent the type of event?

Personally, I like this approach. My reasoning for that is I use my calendar to cover all 24 hours of my life, and conveniently, I can categorize every event in my life using each color available in Google Calendar only once. Allow me to share with you how I break down those categories: 

Group 1: Health – Nutrition (Tomato, or Red), Sleep (Blueberry, or Dark Blue), Exercise (Tangerine, or Orange)

Group 2: Wealth – Networking (Grape, or Purple), Creating (Sage, or light Green), Prospecting (Pink)

Group 3: Culture – Study (Forest Green), Review (Lavender), Rest (Light Blue)

With the two remaining colors, I categorize Travel time (Banana, or Yellow) and Idle time (Graphite or Gray).

From that color-coding system, the above mono-color calendar becomes this:

Now perhaps you’re not as inclined to schedule every aspect of your life on Google Calendar. Not only are you sharing that data with Big Google, having each moment in time blocked off can feel, well, as some of my clients like to put it, it feels like there’s no room to breathe.

Not to worry – you can always create separate calendars for your personal and professional life, each with their own color-coding system. Within a professional-only perspective, you could focus on breaking down your overall business activities. You could designate certain colors for legal work, marketing, sales calls, operations, strategic planning… In the end, its up to you to think about what events need accounting for.

And so, with all these events accounted for, be they for personal or professional means, you can do as much as I want with setting tasks up above in the all-day section of Google Calendar. You can then bring those tasks down to earth, aka our actual schedule… and yeah that’s great and all, setting up a good plan for going about one’s time, especially when it’s made pretty and organized for readability AND functionality…

Truth is however, this is all just still a plan, an expectation of time to come. As we all know, things do not always go according to plan. This brings us to the final trick we can do with Google Calendar: Having a 2nd “schedule” which represents the reality of how our time actually went.

Google Calendar Trick #3: Have A 2nd Calendar Track What You Really Did

Ah, the honest truth. This is probably the most important tip you could possibly take advantage of. It’s too bad that doing this is so time intensive, inaccurate, and worse yet, its so tedious. Don’t worry, I’m working on the solution to this, but first, let’s consider doing this yourself.

Folks, let me premise by saying that you shouldn’t have to or want to do this, but it would very powerful to for just one day, or even a string of days, up to a week, if you’re feeling strongly about it. Tracking where your time actually goes and comparing it to how you expected to invest it…

That is priceless self-reflection. At the very least, it teaches you how to set better expectations. At most, it shows you exactly how and when you deviate from your expectations, which for better or worse, will help you better understand what you should aim to do differently!

So how exactly should you go about doing this, if even for a brief amount of time? Well, the first thing to remember is that you will forget. Yes, you read that write. Try not to wait until the end of the day to fill out what you’ve actually been up to – it’ll be a lot harder to do so well. Next to that, feel free to be quick about it – don’t invest your time in writing the exact minute you started and finished a task. Ball park it.

Lastly, follow your color-coding system! This helps makes reading the reality schedule much more analytically. Once you’ve done that…

Compare your expectations with reality! How did you spend your time? Was it as you expected? Where do you think you lost time? Where do you think you can shave time? How can you set better expectations for tomorrow or the next time you do something specific? It’s so much easier to answer these kinds of questions when you have the truth staring right in front of you. Although again, shame you have to log it all.

In Conclusion

Hopefully you just saved some time and peace of mind for the future by learning a couple new ways you can use Google Calendar to better manage yourself, be it by organizing your highest priority tasks as all-day blocks, be it by accounting for all your important events via color-coding, or be it by analyzing and self-reflecting on how you spend your time via maintaining a 2nd schedule that acts as a time mirror.

Either way, with a little extra work, you can really leverage Google Calendar to do wonders for you. And if that saves you money by helping you ditch other tools, that makes me happy. Expect more from me on productivity and time management moving forward.

Best,

C

P.S.

You may be curious as to how and why I gave each category a specific color. Okay, maybe you weren’t curious. Still… I wanted to share anyway! 

Red is expressly used to convey nutrition, due to our natural incite of hunger upon seeing it. Why do you think Pizza Hut’s colors are red?

Orange represents exercise because it has the color of fire, which I always associate with muscles firing off and generating heat in a workout.

Dark Blue represents sleeping well, to me at least because it conveys very deep rest. Sleep is necessary time to be unconscious, paused.

Light blue goes well with my take on rest vs sleep. Whereas sleep is a deeper kind of rest, light rest on its own goes  a long way for our time.

Purple represents network to me. I think about royalty and connections – the bonds of your network are an important element to success. 

Pink represents prospecting, because it’s a potential relationship-to-be. Think pink to purple; a prospect is but a friend you don’t know yet.

Sage green to me represents Well Aware, my ultimate creation to date. It also represents $$$. In the end, true work is about creating value.

Forest Green is for studying, where true riches comes from. If Creating is light green, Study is forest green. Each grows the other’s reach.

Yellow just fits perfectly with travel. Come on now, TAXI!!!

Gray as idle time… I think its just the perfect way to describe dead time. Avoid dead time!!! At the very least, turn it into rest.

Finally, Lavender goes with review, simply because I just like how I use the other colors and this was the only one left to be honest haha

Thanks for reading.