These tips can help you boost productivity. Photo / 123RF
Last week I covered four clever ways to use a few of the hidden features of Google Calendar for sharing your calendar for work and home. Read it here.
Now let's look at a few of the lovely productivity boosts you can enact.
1. Personal and work calendars
As mentioned last week, you can create multiple Google calendars and these in turn can be private or public.
You might want to create one for personal appointments, birthdays and events to separate them from your work calendar. You can have both - or more showing simultaneously.
To create a new calendar, click the little arrow next to "My calendars," and you'll see an option to "Create new calendar." Select that, choose your desired calendar options.
2. Color Code Your Calendars
Now that you have more than one calendar, you'll want to easily identify events between your different calendars. To set the default text colour color, hover over the calendar name > click the drop-down arrow > select the color you want.
3. Email Yourself a Daily Agenda
You can receive a daily reminder (at 5am) of your day's events and appointments. To enable the reminder it's in Settings > Calendars click Edit notifications next to the calendar you'd like an email notification from > scroll down and check the box next to Daily Agenda. Make sure you click Save to confirm.
4. Enable Offline Access
You might not know that many of Google's apps work offline in Chrome. You'll need to manually activate the feature so that Chrome knows to cache the relevant data when you don't have an internet connection. Go to settings > Offline. You'll need to install the Chrome app (which only works in Chrome of course).
5. Find the Best Times to Meet
Aligning your schedule with others for meetings is often a pain. Once you create an event, go into the details. Click the "Find a time" tab and add any guests who you want to include. They'll need to make sure they share their calendar with you, then you'll see their appointments right alongside yours and you can choose the time that works for everyone.
6. Change your view
Control the way your calendar is displayed. Of course you can have it show the day, week, or month. But you probably didn't know that you can click and drag the dates you want to see in the month box (upper-left corner). This is especially useful for showing the last week of a month and the first week of the next month (something you can't do with the default choices).
7. Activate the Lab!
Lab features are hidden until you find and activate them. Some are useful, so it's worth checking them out. Settings>labs. For example there is the Jump to date. This is a box that allows you to quickly go to dates in the future or past.
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