Planners help people to organize their lives by keeping track of their tasks and activities. Thus, they can make the best use of time like never before. People used to prepare to-do lists and use various other means of planning with the help of diaries to help them perform the tasks on time and improve efficiencies. But maintaining the planner was tedious, especially updating the dynamic list daily by adding new tasks and altering some tasks that required re-scheduling time, which took so much time that it became another task. The process was cumbersome to some extent, and being a manual process, there are chances of omission and errors in maintaining the planner that reduces the efficacy of the process. Moreover, sharing the planner with other members of the team or stakeholders is not possible.
All the shortcomings of the traditional planner are now a thing of the past. Now you can use Google Calendar, which you can check here, to do all that you could do with the conventional planner and much more in scheduling events and meetings, get reminders about upcoming activities, and much more so that you know well what to do next. Since the calendar design considers the needs of the team working, you can share it with many others and even create multiple ones for you as well as the team that you can use together. One thing is for sure that it will help you get more organized and maximize your available time. There are many more reasons why you could look upon it as an indispensable tool for modern living, especially for your professional needs.
As assortment of calendars
Google is not the only calendar that you will come across, as there are many other similar applications available. Google’s offering is different because it is not a single one but a Master calendar consisting of an assortment of a bunch of individual ones all consolidated in one place. You can have separate ones for business or professional use, domestic work, holidays, and anything else that you feel the need for.
It has several features, and the most attractive is the primary feature of customization. You can color the calendars to distinguish its characteristics from other ones. You might prefer blue for your professional obligations, while green is the color of the personal obligations, a purple one for birthdays, a golden one for holidays, and so on. It helps to look at the Master calendar and understand what is happening in different areas at any point in time. By looking at the color codes on the Master calendar, you can track all activities and events across various areas, which is of great convenience.
The option of turning off any calendar is another useful feature that allows you to concentrate on any of them by switching off the other ones. For example, you can focus on the one for work events while switching off the other ones.
Sharing calendars
Google encourages team working as evident from the feature of sharing calendars, which you can share with others. This is an invaluable tool when working with a team as it lends complete transparency among the team members who are all on board and on the same page by sharing the same calendar. It allows the team members to know about the pre-occupation of other members as they can see when the other members are busy. By incorporating the location of a meeting, you can keep others informed about your movements.
To have effective control of it, Google allows you to set permission levels on each calendar so that you can control the extent of access you grant to others. You can either provide full access to create event details and change it on a specific one or allow them only to view the event without editing it.
Gmail integration
To widen the scope of using your calendar, Google has integrated it with Gmail, which enables you to create events right from any email. This is possible because Google scans your emails, and if it finds any email containing date and time, it gives you the option to add an event to your calendar that appears on the right side of the screen. On doing this, the text from the email is copied automatically into the description of the new event in your calendar.
Load public calendars
The one that you use contains your schedules of events and tasks related to various areas, from business to personal to holidays and many more. However, Google widens the scope of calendar use by allowing users to subscribe to a database of other available ones so that you can automatically load any chosen one on your calendar. For example, you can load all holidays in the US on your calendar. Many subscriptions to some calendars are free, like the sunrise or sunset time of your city or the game schedule of your favorite team.
Sync calendars with your phone
The mobile interface of the calendar allows users to integrate it with their smartphones. It gives more flexibility because users can schedule meetings and events from anywhere, anytime, and even when they are on the move. As long as the phone is connected to the internet, you have access to the calendar without relying on computers. Since most smartphones run on Google’s Android operating system, the calendar syncs automatically with your phone once you enter the login credentials on the phone. However, this does not happen automatically on the iPhone, but the process is not much complicated.
Program reminders
The calendar allows you to set reminders so that you receive alerts about tasks or events to attend. Moreover, you can customize the way you would like to receive reminders. Reminders can either be a pop-up notification or delivered in your email. Pop-ups are an easier way to receive reminders that flash on the phone.
Google understands the user needs so much that it has incorporated a search feature in the calendar that adds more convenience.
