Become a Productivity Ninja!

1. About The Course: Hi, I'm Ashley Bell and I'm a Lean and Productivity Specialist based in Ireland. In this course, I'm going to show you how to use your Google calendar or any other online calendar to make the most of the time you have available. There's one thing that we all have in common, and that's time. And how you use that time will determine how successful you are in whatever it is that you do. Come on and join me in this course where I'll show you my techniques for using Google Calendar to maximize my time so that you too can become a productivity ninja. I'll see you inside. 2. Todo lists don't work: If you want to get more done in less time, it's easy. You simply need to schedule time to do it. The end. I hope you've enjoyed this short course and I'd like to invite you to take a look at some of our other great online content. Only joking, scheduling time to get things done is the main objective of this course. But I didn't just arrive at that conclusion by chance. I have tried a ton of ways to get more done, but through testing and measuring over time, I found that this approach has exceeded all of my expectations. And I've seen it work wonders for other people too. I used to work as a project manager, and as you can imagine, that's the type of job where you need to be quite organized. At that time, there wasn't great connectivity between apps and devices like we have now. I tried to run my work through online scheduling software several times, but I always ended up coming back to my trustee four page per day diary. The paper approach worked really well for me for years, and as you can see, here's the evidence, although I did have a few mishaps here, I forgot my diary or I thought I'd lost it, but luckily I always managed to get it back. This is just one of the risks of running a paper based system. And that's why I'm always keen to try something digital. As time moved on, apps began to offer more synchronization across devices. And that's when I decided to try a fairly new app at the time called Trello. Trello is a great visual list management app. Basically you have a blank canvas where you can add lists. Within the lists, you can add cards and the cards are essentially your to do items. A common approach is to create three lists side by side and label them not started in progress and complete. You can then drag and drop your cards into the relevant columns as work progresses. This initially worked really well for me. Whenever I had something new to do or a new idea, I added it to my not started list. When I started working on it, I moved it into my in progress list and finally into completed when it was finished. This is a really nice approach because you can see visually exactly what you've got going on. And it feels great when you get to drop something into the completed column. This is a brilliant approach if you can keep on top of all your new to do items and everything you've got in progress. But over time, I found that my not started list got so long, I no longer had any idea what was on it. I was starting to feel a bit fed up as well because I just wasn't getting enough done. For every one thing I was completing, I was probably adding three new things to the list. Unfortunately, this is real life. We have a never ending growing list of things that we could and should do, but no more time to get things done. One good thing was that for the first time, I had a digital to do list which was accessible across all of my devices. I've gotten everything out of my head onto my list. It's actually amazing. When you do this, you start to realize how much we actually keep up here. I realized that by getting things out of my head onto my list, I was actually unburdening my mind. But just because it was on my list, it didn't mean that it was going to get done. This was the biggest problem. With my new approach, I realized that I needed to start setting deadlines for my tasks. Trello does have a way to help you do this, but personally I need something a bit more visual. I've recently started using Google Calendar to book meetings with my clients, and it suddenly dawned on me. I've been trying to get all of these to do items completed in the white space between these client meetings. Along with all the other day to day miscellaneous things which pop up along the way. There are a couple of universally recognized laws of science, which I'd just like to quickly cover here. The first one is Sods law. If something can go wrong, then it will go wrong, meaning all of the white space between my meetings would always get filled up with the last minute requests and general busy work. The other lesser known, but slightly more respected law is Parkinson's Law, which says work expands to fit the time available. This is absolutely true. By leaving my schedule empty between meetings, I was inviting all of that busy work to become very elastic and fill up the time. I decided to start booking time in my calendar with myself. Get all of the things on my trailer list done, and the results blew me away. I began to get more done than I ever had before. But it did take commitment and willpower to stick to what was on the schedule. My new mantra is if it's not on the calendar, then it's not happening. Hopefully that will be yours soon too. If you think you've got the willpower and the commitment, your first assignment is to start listing everything you can think of which needs to get done, along with all of your day to day routines like getting up in the morning, commuting, shopping, everything. There's no time like the present. Start writing that list and I'll see you in the next video. 3. Where to Start With Timeboxing?: If there's only one video you watch in this whole series, this should be the one when I think about the term time boxing, I imagine two clocks in a wrestling ring battling it out. If you're here to learn about that, then I'm afraid you're in the wrong place this time. Boxing is about setting aside time to actually get things done. Over the years, I've discovered that creating lists of things to do is great, but unless you actually allocate time to do them, they rarely ever get done. I'm sure that if you tried this approach, you're going to be amazed by how productive you become. The first thing you need to do. Schedule all of your repeating activities. These are your routines. Things like getting up in the morning, taking the kids to school, having lunch, commuting, and cooking dinner. By doing this, you will have created some time boundaries. You'll probably be shocked by how little time you have in between those boundaries to get all of your other to do items done. The next thing you need to do is start adding in time to do to do items. Make sure that you're realistic about how long each thing is going to take. I tend to schedule things in 15 minutes. Blocks less than this isn't really realistic because we generally tend to underestimate how long it takes to start and finish an activity. If something's genuinely going to take only a couple of minutes, then see if you can group it in with a few other things to create a 15 minute block. If you're not sure how long something's going to take, then just give it your best guess. If you go over the time you've allocated for an activity, then you can simply reschedule the next thing that you've got in the calendar, or you can look for the next available slot and book in more time to do it. Then this is also an opportunity to learn, learn about how long things actually take so that you can make better plans in the future. If you're really going to commit to this method, then the next few weeks are going to be the hardest. It's going to take commitment and discipline to stick to what's in your calendar and not let yourself drift into doing things that you haven't scheduled. If something comes up while you're working on an activity, just add into the calendar at the next available time. This will happen and it's really important that you start as you mean to go on. Once you've made it through the first few weeks, you'll find that you've whittled down most of the things on your to do list and you'll probably be able to schedule in more time to do the things you actually want to do. What are you waiting for? Let's get started right away. 4. Scheduling Time Off: So you're doing great. You've got everything scheduled in your calendar and hardly anything left on your to do list. But now you need to take some time off. Maybe you have a holiday or maybe you're just going to have some time out of the office. How are you going to handle that? The way I approach this is I schedule some events on the days that I'm going to be away. To visually block my calendar, I normally stretch these out from around 04:00 A.M. until about 09:00 P.M. because it's going to take up the whole day and nobody's realistically going to be looking for meetings with me outside of those hours. This also means that when I'm organizing my schedule a couple of weeks ahead, I won't see any empty slots in my calendar. I then set these events to repeat for as many days as I'm going to be unavailable. You could create what's called an all day event in Google Calendar, and this will appear at the top of each day. However, I found that it's much more beneficial to actually block the time in the calendar with an event. This is so much more obvious when you're planning ahead. And let me tell you you will be planning ahead. Personally, my experience using the all day events option to block time off hasn't been great in Google Calendar. You only get to see the first three all day events at the top of the calendar window. If there are any additional all day events, there'll be hidden behind a link that says something like two more or three more events. Because of this in the past, I've actually missed an all day event and ended up arranging a meeting with the client because the calendar actually looked free. I always recommend that you block time with a well labeled event. This is very visual and it will give you much greater clarity on what's coming up in your calendar. See in the next video. 5. Scheduling Time With Other People: Now this is going to be a short one. I just wanted to give you some quick tips about what to do when other people are involved in your calendar events. The first tip is if you're meeting someone and you have their E mail address, always add them to your calendar event. This is just a courtesy and you're creating the event anyway. So it won't take any extra time to add them. Even if they're not using Google Calendar, they still get an email notification and they will be able to add that to their own calendar if they are using one Tip Number two is if you're meeting in a physical location, always add the location to the location field in Google Calendar. This is linked to Google Maps. Both you and your invitee will get a link to the location. This can really help avoid confusion about the meeting place. Both of you will be able to click the link, which will also take you directly into Google Maps for directions. I find that really handy. Tip number three is that you should add other people for information purposes. Whether you're taking the cat to be there or attending the school play. You're going to be adding it to your calendar anyway. Invite others who need to know and they'll have it in their calendar even if it's just for information purposes. The fourth and final tip, don't assume that everyone else is using an online calendar. If you arrange to meet someone and you don't know if they're using an online calendar, always tell them that you'll send them a calendar invite. This is a great way of letting people know that you're super organized and using an online calendar to manage your time more effectively, Raising awareness of this will encourage others to do the same. Sometimes you'll even be surprised by the people who are using an online calendar. 6. What to Do if You Need to Use Other Online Calendars: In this lesson, I'm going to share with you how I manage multiple online calendars. Sometimes you might find that you need to use another calendar system alongside your own. This tends to happen to me when I work with clients who set me up in their own IT systems. This results in me managing my own business activities through my Google calendar and anything I'm doing through my client in, let's say their Outlook calendar. This is how I deal with it when I'm booking meetings or adding events to my client calendar. I'll also include my Google account as an invitee. For me, that's my business e mail address. I'll also invite Ashley at Nexus Improvement.com This means that the events show up straight away in my Google calendar. And it just helps me prevent any last minute surprises. If I'm going to be working with a client on a regular basis, then I'll tend to just block book the time in my Google calendar. Then I'll use my client's calendar to manage the time that I'll be working with them by block booking my Google calendar. I'm just making it really obvious to myself that I'm occupied at that time. That helps me prevent accidentally booking any unrelated events. It also means that because I'm using my client's systems, they'll be able to easily see my availability and book time with me. If I'm receiving invitations in my client calendar, I'll normally ask if people can also add my Google account as an invitee, but if they forget, I'll always just forward those e mails onto my Google account. Either of these options result in my invitations appearing in my Google calendar. And it just, again, helps me keep on top of everything that's going on. The next option is a little more technical, but it's by far the best if you can get it set up. And that's to synchronize your client calendar with your Google calendar. This means that you can overlay your client calendar in your Google account and any new meetings which are added are updated automatically. No need to forward anything or add any extra invitees. As far as I know, this only works if your client calendar is a web based service. And Microsoft, for example, do offer an online version of Outlook, but it's sometimes disabled due to security policies. If this is the case, then you'll just need to use one of the other options I've already given for step by step instructions on how to set up some of these configurations. Don't forget to watch the how to videos also included in this course. 7. Dealing With Emails and Admin Activities: In this lesson, I'm going to share how you can use your online calendar to improve your e mail management. And what to do with all those small day to day activities which you need to get done on a regular basis. To start off, let's talk about e mails. The first thing you need to do is create a routine in your calendar for checking your e mails. It's completely up to you if you want to do this once, twice, three times per day, or even more personally, I have an hour scheduled every morning and a half an hour scheduled at the end of the day. The thing about e mails is people don't really expect a reply immediately. If it's something that's really urgent, you can guarantee that they will call you. Assuming that this is all new to you. I can guarantee that resisting the urge to peek into your e mails is going to be so hard. But please just try it for a day and see if anything catastrophic happens. I promise you it won't. It's not like I'm telling you to never check your e mails. I'm just saying that you should only do it when you've scheduled it into your calendar. If you think this is going to be a challenge, then I suggest that you look at your pop ups and your notifications and see if you can disable those. Because it's really going to make it so much harder for you Now that we've set up our routine. It's time to check our e mails using the time that we've blocked in our calendar, specifically for checking our e mails. You're going to start at the top and you're going to work down through all of the new E mails that you have. What we're doing here, it's really a filtering activity. If there's something specific that you're waiting for, there's no harm scanning through that list and seeing if you can find it and dealing with it then and there. But anything that you can action then and there should be done immediately. Don't put it off if it's only going to take a few minutes. Eventually you're you're going to come to some e mail that you can't deal with immediately. At this stage what you're going to do, and it's not going to surprise you, you're going to put it into your calendar at another time to deal with it. Then if that e mail is really urgent and it needs to be dealt with then and there, then you're just going to have to book it into your calendar now and move whatever was coming up afterwards to the next available slot. But honestly, e mails rarely need to be actioned immediately. Now let's talk about all of those little activities which you need to do to keep your business and your lives on track and which just take up only a couple of minutes. This is another easy one. I'm sure you're going to guess what I'm going to say it is to put it in the calendar. But this time let's group some of those things together under one entry and call it something like weekly admin because these are just small things. What I want you to do is then use bullet points in the description of the meeting to list the individual things. Essentially what we're doing is we're grouping all of those things into a weekly or whatever frequency is applicable event. And we're creating a checklist of things that need to get done. What you've probably been doing up until now is trying to cram all of those little things into the free time that you don't really have. Because of this, it isn't planned work, so you've probably been forgetting things, You've probably been leaving them to the last minute and putting yourself under massive pressure. And remember, this approach is all about taking the guesswork out of what we're doing so that we can un, burden our minds and live a less stressful life. 8. Dealing With Phone Calls: In this lesson, I'm going to share how you can use your online calendar to improve your e mail management. And what to do with all those small day to day activities which you need to get done on a regular basis. To start off, let's talk about e mails. The first thing you need to do is create a routine in your calendar for checking your e mails. It's completely up to you if you want to do this once, twice, three times per day, or even more personally, I have an hour scheduled every morning and a half an hour scheduled at the end of the day. The thing about e mails is people don't really expect a reply immediately. If it's something that's really urgent, you can guarantee that they will call you. Assuming that this is all new to you. I can guarantee that resisting the urge to peek into your e mails is going to be so hard. But please just try it for a day and see if anything catastrophic happens. I promise you it won't. It's not like I'm telling you to never check your e mails. I'm just saying that you should only do it when you've scheduled it into your calendar. If you think this is going to be a challenge, then I suggest that you look at your pop ups and your notifications and see if you can disable those. Because it's really going to make it so much harder for you Now that we've set up our routine. It's time to check our e mails using the time that we've blocked in our calendar, specifically for checking our e mails. You're going to start at the top and you're going to work down through all of the new E mails that you have. What we're doing here, it's really a filtering activity. If there's something specific that you're waiting for, there's no harm scanning through that list and seeing if you can find it and dealing with it then and there. But anything that you can action then and there should be done immediately. Don't put it off if it's only going to take a few minutes. Eventually you're you're going to come to some e mail that you can't deal with immediately. At this stage what you're going to do, and it's not going to surprise you, you're going to put it into your calendar at another time to deal with it. Then if that e mail is really urgent and it needs to be dealt with then and there, then you're just going to have to book it into your calendar now and move whatever was coming up afterwards to the next available slot. But honestly, e mails rarely need to be actioned immediately. Now let's talk about all of those little activities which you need to do to keep your business and your lives on track and which just take up only a couple of minutes. This is another easy one. I'm sure you're going to guess what I'm going to say it is to put it in the calendar. But this time let's group some of those things together under one entry and call it something like weekly admin because these are just small things. What I want you to do is then use bullet points in the description of the meeting to list the individual things. Essentially what we're doing is we're grouping all of those things into a weekly or whatever frequency is applicable event. And we're creating a checklist of things that need to get done. What you've probably been doing up until now is trying to cram all of those little things into the free time that you don't really have. Because of this, it isn't planned work, so you've probably been forgetting things, you've probably leaving them to the last minute and putting yourself under massive pressure. And remember, this approach is all about taking the guesswork out of what we're doing so that we can unburden our minds and live a less stressful life. 9. Sticking With It (Don’t Give Up!): In this lesson, I want to encourage you to stick to the time boxing system. You will find it difficult in the beginning and the first few weeks are the hardest. This is because you're basically untangling all of the chaotic, unplanned work to do activities and routines that you have going on for too long. You've been hoping to get everything done, but now you're planning to get everything done. Once you start to get everything in your calendar, you're actually going to be amazed by how much you have to do and how little time you have to get it done. The first time I did this, my calendar was booked out for about six weeks. When I tried to re, arrange things, when things didn't go to plan, it was quite hard to find the time to put those things in. Once you get over this initial phase, you will be surprised by how productive you've been in such a short space of time. You'll begin to feel so much more in control because you've put routines in place. However, it's not going to be all smooth sailing over time. You're going to experience drift. By this I mean that small bad habits are going to creep in initially, it's not going to make much difference, but as they accumulate over time, you're going to start to notice things like you forgot to attend a meeting, or you were late for a meeting because you didn't check your calendar the night before. Or something needs to be done urgently because it was never scheduled in the first place. I know this is going to happen to you because it happened to me. The most important thing is that you're conscious of it and you take steps to get back on track. When you notice things are starting to slip, ask yourself, are there routines that you need to change to get the system working better for you and your lifestyle? My approach is absolutely flexible. Take what I've shown you and make it your own if it's going to help you achieve the results that you need. The final thing I have to say is don't give up. Stay focused. And if you're really struggling, send me an e mail. I'll see if I can help you get back on track. 10. My Lessons Learned: In this lesson, I want to go over some of the things I've learned and some of the mistakes I've made since I started using this approach. The first thing which I've mentioned in another video is drift. And I'm repeating it here because it's going to be your biggest challenge to succeeding with time boxing. This happens where you gradually drift away from planning activities in your online calendar. You won't even notice that it's happening until things start to go wrong. Initially, it will be little things like running late and then it'll be bigger things like missing meetings altogether. This is all because you start doing things which you haven't planned in your schedule. Another thing that you might notice is that you suddenly start to feel really busy Again, this is because you're doing things which you haven't planned in advance. Like I've said before, I am guilty of this. Whenever I notice myself doing it, I ran myself in and I start making sure that everything is going into my online calendar. Please be conscious of drift. The next thing is not checking my calendar in the evenings and before I start work in the mornings, the night before is an ideal opportunity to review what's coming up the next day and make any last minute adjustments. If you're using the mobile app, this is so easy and you can just do it in bed before you turn the lights off. When you stop doing this, eventually you will miss an early meeting or an activity which is outside of your normal routine. It only takes a second to have a quick look before you go to sleep and make sure you haven't got any early morning meetings planned. If bedtime doesn't suit you, then just add it to the end of your work routine. But please make sure that you schedule time to do it. The next thing is not adding things into your calendar as soon as they come up. And this is definitely something which I consider to be very drifty. You think to yourself that's something that needs to go into my online calendar and then you think, I'll remember to do that later, but trust me, you will forget to do this more times than you remember. Just pull out your phone, add it in then and there, even if it's just the basic details. Another really important thing is adding notes to explain to your future self what needs to happen during that event. Don't fall into the trap of thinking. I'll remember what this is about because it's another one where nine times out of ten you will not remember. Most of the time. It's enough to just give the event a meaningful title. But when things are a little bit more complex, you might want to add some bullet points into the description or a general outline explaining what needs to be done. In some cases, you may have scheduled the event weeks in advance and you really don't want to spend time messing around trying to figure out what you had to do. Another one of the hardest things when you start using the time boxing approach will be sticking to the time boxes themselves. It's really easy to think I'm just going to check this e mail while this web page loads, or I'm just going to finish this other thing before I start the next. This undermines the whole concept and many of the benefits that you're expecting to get out of using the time boxing technique. Stay focused on what you got scheduled and please resist the urge to do other things. If you do need to do something urgently, reschedule or cancel what's currently in your calendar and then slot in the new activity. The last thing which I'm going to talk to you about here is something that I'm currently experimenting with. This is the idea of locking in the current week. We don't want any last minute surprises because this leads to extra busy work, rescheduling of planned events and general firefighting. Although I do accept that sometimes unforeseen events happen and we need to deal with things immediately, we don't want to generally run our time like that. We want to plan everything in advance as much as possible. That's why I'm experimenting with locking in the current week. Once the week starts, avoid adding any new activities. Essentially, the week is locked and it should not change Any new meetings or anything else that comes up should be scheduled in the subsequent weeks. This is working really well for me so far, and I would really suggest that you give this a go as well. That's it for this video. I'll update this section as I improve myself and as I get feedback from others and I learn what is and isn't working well for them. 11. The Technical Bit: Welcome to the technical bit. So this is going to be a really simple class. This is going to be so easy. It's all about getting you set up on Google calendar, finding where it is if you need a Google account, how you create one. So if you already have a Google calendar, you know where it is, you have a Google account. This lesson is probably not for you. You can just skip ahead. This is for people who are absolute beginners and they need a little bit of help getting set up. Let's get started. The first thing is, do you have a Google account? Most people will probably have a Google account these days, but just in case you don't, I'm going to show you where to get one. I'm going to open an incognito window here, which it's like as if I wasn't logged in. So I'm going to go to Google.com If you haven't got a Google account, if you haven't been on Google before, where have you been? But just in case you haven't, this message will pop up. If you accept the privacy terms, you can click Accept. And then where do you go from here? So you don't have a Google account, you can click at the blue button in the top right hand corner to sign in. Now it's going to give you the option to sign in, but there's a button here that says Create Account. If I click on that, it then asks me, is it for personal use, Is it for a child, or is it for my business? We're going to ignore child for now. That's not really relevant to what we're doing. But we will look at personal use because this is the one that we are going to be using here. The other option is business. We're not really going to go into business. But the difference there is that you get to have an e mail address with your business domain. So your business web address. If your company is Abc.com then your e mail address would be your name at Abc.com And Google actually allows you to create an account using the e mail address of your business. That comes with additional features. There's things in there. If you're using Google Calendar for business, there are benefits like insights into the amount of time that you're putting in the calendar and if you've categorized that time, how that's broken down. There are other benefits there, like team sharing of the calendar. There's multiple things you can do with the business account, but we're going to focus on personal. When you click personal, it comes up with a form to fill out, and you just go ahead complete that form and set up your Google account. That's great. So we've got a Google account. Now the next thing is, where do we find Google Calendar as well? You could Google it, of course, but very easy. Just come up to the top right hand corner, the little waffle on here. Click on that, It's going to show you this list of all of the apps that you have available on your account. One of those near the top there is Google Calendar. I can click on that to open it. Another way of getting into Google Calendar, if you're feeling a bit frisky, let's go back to Google.com We're on Google. You could actually type calendar.google.com Do you see that's come up there? And I actually, I've already been on Google calendar. So once you've been on there, it's in your search history. If you just start typing calendar in the address bar that will pop up, you can just press Enter the next thing, and this is to wrap up the lesson in getting set up on the PC version of Google. Calendar is creating a favorite because this is going to be your Bible. This is going to be how you run all your day to day activities. It's going to be how you run your life is going to be based on this calendar. We need really quick access to it. We don't want to be typing in calendar and clicking buttons and things like that. So we're going to add a favorite the way you do that, we're on Google Calendar. Here, you open the page you want to add a favorite to. And in the star in the top right corner here, we just click on that, We can see it's given it a name, this is favorites, bookmarks, it's the same thing, but normally the name will come from the tab. Up here, you can see that the tab, the web page we're on is actually called Google Calendar. This is given away when I made this now 8 January 2023. That's up there. We don't really need all that information here. I would get rid of all of that. I would say, anytime you're creating a favorite, get rid of all that information. Do we need to know it's Google Calendar? Not really. We just want to keep it as simple as possible. And then below that, where are we going to save this? Which folder? The default one that was there is the correct one. We want to save it in our bookmarks folder. Our bookmarks folder. Of course, it's in our bookmarks folder, in our bookmark bar. We're going to look at that now. We're going to click Done. That's it. That's done to the star has changed to blue. That's great. But where is it? We have to reveal bookmarks bar. What we're going to do is in the top right corner, because there's only something you really need to do on top right corner, click the three buttons and then we're going to go to bookmarks on that list. And then we're going to come across and down to show bookmarks bar. I'm going to click on that, or you could do control shift on the keyboard for Bravo. Now I've done that, everything just dropped down very slightly. There's a bit of extra white space after the address bar here, and you can see now it says calendar in the top left corner. That's obviously the favorite that we added or the bookmark we added. Anytime I want to get to my calendar now, I can just click that link. It doesn't matter what website on, let's go to, for example, BBC. Okay, there we are, BBC website. But we're here, we're browsing around. But now we want to jump back to our online calendar, so we can just click this button up here. What I would do, personally, the way I use this is I have it open all the time up here, and I just use separate web tabs and I can just always jump back to it there. That's basically it for the PC version. Next we're going to look at how you do this on Android. So here we are in my Android device. Let's go through how you set up Google Calendar Here. The first thing is, do you have Google Calendar installed? If you've got an Android phone and I'm sorry, Phone users? Apple users. I just don't have an Apple product. So I'm not sure how exactly it works, but I'm sure it's much the same as on the Android. I'm sure there's not that many differences. So you can probably follow along no problem. Do you have it installed? It comes on an Android phone, installed by default. But in case you've uninstalled it, or you were given the phone secondhand and the previous user had uninstalled it. All you have to do is go to the play store to install it on the iphone. I believe it's the app store you click on there. And then you can just search for calendar. You can even put in Google Calendar. You can see anyway, to put in Calendar. And Google Calendar is the first thing to come up on the list. That's the one we want. We would click into it and we would click Install. As it happens, I have it installed, that's great, That's perfect. We have Google Calendar installed on our phone. Google Calendar is what we're going to be using to do everything. Having it on our phone is going to be essential to that because we want to be able to dive into it quickly and check things, and add things when we're on the go. The next thing is you should really add the Google Calendar widget. I'm going to hold my finger on the screen. I'm on the home screen here. Hold my finger on the home screen. Now you can see some options have popped up. In this case, I am going to choose widgets at the bottom on that list of widgets from all the different apps that I have. You'll see there Google Calendar, The widget that I recommend is the second one you can see that's popped up on the screen now. And I'm just going to click done in the top right corner. Now we've got our Google calendar on the screen. This is brilliant. Now I've got a view of the whole month. If I want to jump into a particular day, say today, for example, I can just tap on that day. And here we are. We can see the line across the screen at the point where we are. So if I want to add something in at 03:00 I can do that. I can just say, there we go, this is a test. Perfect, there we go. That's in the calendar. Now if I come out of the calendar app, you can see that appears as a line on that particular day when you're like me and your whole day is full up of lots of different entries in your calendar. You're not really going to be using this to see what you have going on that day. You will be clicking in to the day and you'll be using this great feature, it's like a rolling schedule here to see what's coming up next. And what you have to do that is as simple as anything, anyone can set Google up on their phone and we're going to go on to the next lesson. Now, I hope that's been useful to talk to you soon. 12. Web App Orientation: Hi there. Welcome back. In this episode, we are going to look at the layout of Google Calendar. This layout we're looking at here is obviously on the PC or the web version. And I'm going to take you through the three main areas. The three main areas, it's divided into really the top bar here, the main menu, they call here on the left hand side. And the main area, the main calendar view in the middle. Let's start at the top. So the first icon here, it looks like the classic app burger icon. When we hover over that, it says Main Menu. And when we click on it, it actually what they called the main menu there on the left hand side, it hides that left hand bar. If you need a bit more space on the calendar, that's what you can do. Then we've got the Today button. If I click on that, it will just jump me over to today's date, which is really handy. I use that feature all the time, especially if I'm planning ahead. It's just really handy to jump back to see where we are today. Then we've got the previous and next buttons at the moment, it says previous week, next week. But obviously it depends on the view that we're looking at. And we'll cover views in an upcoming video at the moment I can do previous previous week, next week, next week, and so on. Then we've got the month and the year, and I like to display the week number as well, which can be changed in the settings. Then we've got search. Search is a great feature as you can imagine from Google. It just lets you search any keyword for any of your calendar entries. It lets you search people who were invited to specific calendar entries or events. That's really useful as well. Then we've got support, which obviously gives us access to Google support. Then we've got our Settings menu, but there's a few things on here. We've got the settings link, we've got the bin. So if we delete something from our calendar, it's not normally deleted straight away. We can actually get it back if we need to. And we click there and it will just show us all the items in the bin and we can recover them if we need to. Then we've got Density and Color. This just gives us two options really. I'll click it here just so you can see we've got the modern view, which is what I'm using when you add an event to the calendar. The event will show typically by default in blue with white text. But you can change that to classic, which is a light blue with black text. I like to keep it on the modern version. The information density just compacts the grid here that you can see. If I just click compact, you just see that that gets a bit smaller so it fits a bit more on the screen. I like to keep that responsive, that's what that does. We've also got an option here to print, and we've got an option to get add ons as well. You can actually add little apps onto Google Calendar as well, and we may cover that on a separate video as well. Then we've got our views. This allows us to select different views, and I'll talk about that in a separate video. Then we've got across, I think all the Google apps are set out this way. We have our apps on the waffle icon, which gives us access to our apps, and then access to our account as well. Then we've got on the left hand side, what Google are calling the main menu. Here you can see we've got a button that says Create. From there we can add calendar events or tasks. Then we've got our month view again. We've got that previous and next button. We can click there to go to the previous month, the next month. And this just gives us the little calendar view. The nice thing about this is we can click the individual dates to just jump to those. At the moment, we are 14 January, so if I wanted to look at the 26, I can click there because I'm in the week view, it will just jump me over to the 26, but it will keep me in that view. If I want to see 2 February the same. I'm just going to go ahead one more day here, one more week. And you can see there as well. We've got the option to add bank holidays as well, so I'm going to come to that in a second. Next thing is we can search for people if we've invited. We've got the search feature up here, but this one here specifically lets us search for people we've invited to meetings, then our meetings or tasks I should say. Then we've got the, my calendars. Another nice feature is that this system allows you to have multiple calendars. So you could have different categories, so you could have a personal calendar. You can see here, it's got birthdays, reminders, tasks. You can switch those on and off and layer them up. The main calendar view. The last one here, I've got Holidays in Ireland. If I click on that, you can see Bridget's new public holidays, so we're getting an extra public holiday this year. If I click that tick on and off, you can see how that layers it will just hide or display it. Now a nice feature here is there's quite a few pre built calendars. If I click the plus next to other calendars, I can do browse calendars of interest from there. If I just click on it. There's different, there's religious calendars, there's actually sports calendars as well. There's regional calendars. I could find whatever country you're in watching this, I could find that on this list. And by selecting it, I can add it to my calendar and see all of those public holidays coming up along the top of my screen here. That's very useful. You might have seen an option there as well to subscribe to calendars. If I'm using Google Calendar and you're using Google Calendar, I can subscribe to your calendar if you give me permission to do so. Then I can see your events and your schedule coming up on my calendar, which is again, very useful. There's a feature to import there and all kinds of things. That's the main menu on the left hand side. Then we're onto the main event, which is the calendar view. We've got the view that I'm looking at is the week view. I've got Monday to Sunday across the top, the days of the week. Down the left hand side, I've got my time scale. You can see this creates a grid and it's normally laid out as a into 1 hour blocks. When I click on here, you can see I can add calendar events. And I can change the size of those as well, move them around. And we'll cover that in a separate lesson as well. We've got the timescale, we've got our calendar grid, and we've got our days of the week along the top. There's not really too much more to say about that. I probably just mentioned this line along the top, you can see S Bridget's Day is there now. This is just separate. It's something it's normally an all day event, It's something that's occurring on that day. I like to think it's something that's of note for that day, but it's not something that you need in your schedule. It's just something you need to know is occurring that day and it goes at the top. You can set those things to be available or busy time so that it blocks your calendar if you want to for the whole day. But they're just things of note along the top. If you've got tasks in Google Calendar, they'll appear up there as well. And then finally, on the right hand side, we've got our Google Apps menu. There's a few things in here. By default, Google Keep Tasks, Contacts, and Google Maps. And then you can click here to other add ons and add other apps into your Google Calendar. That's it for the layout in the PC version. Next we'll have a look at the Android app. 13. Android App Orientation: Okay, so let's take a look at the Android version of Google Calendar. I have it open here on my phone, in front of me. The first thing is the widget I really like to use the widget that's available for Android devices. I'm sure it's available for Apple devices as well. This is just so handy because it sits on the desktop of your phone or the home screen. It just shows you a view of the month, whichever month you're looking at. Very simple. We can see the month we're looking at. There's a plus icon there as well, which just allows us to add calendar events. I would never use that icon. There's much better ways to use the app. And then we've got a previous and next. In this case it's the month. So it just shows me the next month or the previous month. I can click into one of the items on the list, one of the dates that just brings me into the app on that specific date. That's why I really like using that widget because I can see the whole month. And I can just jump into a date. If someone says to me, are you free on this particular date, I can just swipe across to the widget and I can click on that date. And it brings up that schedule for the day. I find that really useful. The Android app is laid out much in the same way as the web version of the app. I'm going to click the burger icon in the top left corner, the little menu icon. That just gives me a similar view to what we had on the web version. The only difference really is it doesn't show me the month calendar at the top, it just shows me the different views that I have access to. Then there's a refresh button. But generally I find that the calendar updates and refreshes almost instantly. I never really find I have to use that. Then we've got the different calendars that we've got access to. At the very bottom of that list, we've got our settings as well. To get out of that menu, I just click on the gray area on the right. We're back to our calendar view. Then we've got the month. If I click on the month, you can see there's a little drop down on there. So I'm going to click on the Month. Here you've got the month view again. Here I can click into a specific day and it brings me up the schedule for that day. Another thing you can do here is you can swipe from left to right to move between the different months. Just like that. And the other nice thing is if I just click here, maybe on the 15th. Another nice thing is we've got our search feature as well at the top of the screen. Just like on the web app, we can search for all our calendar entries. We can search for people's names, that kind of thing. And then we've got Add Today button. This is probably one of the features that I use, the most, very simple, but very powerful. Let's say for example, I'm looking at 15 December. I'm organizing things there. And I say I need to jump back to today just to see what's coming up today. So click that button, and it just brings me to the exact time we're at, in that particular day. Really, really useful. If you're jumping around from different things in the calendar, you can always just click on that to bring you back to today's schedule. Then we where it says, I've got an A here, that's just my Google account, just like on the web version. Then we've obviously below this, we've got our time line, we've got our schedule. But then in the bottom right corner, we've got a blue square with a plus, which allows us to add calendar entries. Now depending on what type of account you have, you'll see different things here. I'm just going to click that. Now I have this app linked up with my Google Workspace account. So I have a professional business version of Google. And there's a couple of extra options here, like out of office working location. Typically, if you're using just the consumer version of Google calendar, the free version, then you won't have that, but you will have reminders and you will have tasks and you will have events. So you can click any of those to add those to your calendar. So that's the layout of the Google Calendar app on Android, I'll see in the next video. 14. Calendar Views: Okay, so now we're going to take a look at views. Views basically allow you to display the calendar in different ways to suit your needs. Typically, I stick to the weak view because I just like to have the week planned out in front of me. Generally, when I'm working, I'll be using the web version of Google Calendar. So I'd like to just see the whole week, what's coming up. And then if I'm planning something for the next week, it's just handy. You can just click into the next week and you can see everything that's coming up there. It just works really well for me. There's a couple of other ways to display the calendar in the view button in the top right corner. We just click there and we can see we've got a few different things there. The day is as you would expect, it just shows you a specific day. I find this works really well on the phone. I don't tend to use this on the web version. But one nice feature of this is that if you've got multiple calendars, say for example, if you're subscribed to another person's calendar, then you will actually see their calendar besides yours. It basically stacks them up in columns. I'll have my calendar. Then their calendar, I have a couple of different Google accounts. I have those signed in in the same browser. They will all show up side by side, which is really a nice feature if you're working with other people and they've shared their calendar with you and you want to see what their availability is. But typically, I wouldn't really use this view on the web version. Then we've got the week, which is the one that I like to use. A nice feature of the weak view is if we click on this at the bottom here, there's an option to show or hide weekends. We just see Monday to Friday, then you can turn that back on there, then there's an option there to show declined events. Sometimes people invite you to events, other people who are using online calendars. I think if I remember rightly, they show up as a kind of shaded out like a cross hatch shade over those if you've declined them, but you can choose to hide those altogether if you want to. Then we've got the next one, which is the month view. This is basically just the same as what we have on the left hand side, but it will show bars of information or list items for each day, but there's only so much information it can show here. This is a test account that I've set up so I can show you how to use Google Calendar. There's not really a lot in here at the moment, but when we get through into the next phases of this demo in the other course videos, I might come back and update this with some examples of how this calendar might look when there's lots going on. The reason that I don't use it is because when you're using the calendar as I'm teaching you to use it here, there will just be so much information in there. This won't be relevant because it can only display about four or five events at a time. It's not really going to be of much use to you. And you have the one on the left there. Anyway, then we've got the year view. Same thing again, I just find it's very easy. I wouldn't really be going much beyond a couple of months in advance. Typically, I would rarely use this view as well. I just use the next and previous buttons at the top and just notice as well. They changed obviously depending on what view you're using. We're in the year view, so this will take me to 2024 and so on. I tend not to use the year view that much. Then the schedule view, it's a bit like the day view, but it only lists the events that are in the calendar. I've put a test event in there on 6 February, so you can see there's an all day event which is a public holiday. And then there's one item in the calendar on that day, which is my ten to 1030 test event. It will just list what's going on. It won't show you in a time line, which is the way I like to see it on the phone, but it will just list it out. Then the last option here is a four day view. I never really use this either. If you like to work this way or a three day view, something like that, then absolutely this will completely work with the process that we're learning here, the system that we're learning. But I tend not to use this because I like to see the whole week. I'm sure once we finish this you'll be the same as well. We tend not to use that. I believe you can change that as well. In the settings two or three day view or a two day view. Whatever you like to see, you can change. And that option will update there to whatever view that is you like. But I like the view, weak view. There we go. The final thing I want to tell you here is just a little tip that I came across by accident once. Was that on the left hand side here on this month view, you can actually click and drag across to select however many days you want to see. It might be that you just want to see three days. We've got three days, might be that you want to see two weeks. There we go, we've got two weeks side by side. That will more or less you could use that with the way we're going to work. I think probably if it's a week, you you've still got the time line down the side, that's perfect. But when you get into two weeks, three weeks, you lose that time line. So it's not going to be as useful. Back to the week, and we will leave it there and have a quick look at the Android app. Okay, we're in the Android app here and I have the widget open, just the way I'd like to see it. I'm just going to click on, I think, February. Yeah, we have something in the diary there for February the six. I'm just going to click on February the six. And it just brings me up that day view. Day view is typically the only view I use on the calendar app. I just find that it's so handy for just seeing what my schedule is that day. When I'm on the go, if someone asks me, are you free on a particular day, I can pick that day and just see all the things that are going on that day. Another nice feature of this is that you can swipe from left to right, so I can go through sequentially to the upcoming days. That's really useful as well. Let's go back to the six now. Let's talk about views. That's what we're here for. If I click the main menu icon in the top left corner, we can see that we've got different views. You'll notice they're much the same as they are on the web version. We've got our schedule, We've got our schedule view. They're a little bit prettier with some pictures as well. We've got our day view, which we've just seen. Then we've got our three day view if you want to see a three day view, I don't find that particularly helpful. The weak view, which I like, isn't really helpful on the phone because it's just to squashed together, you can turn the phone to landscape mode and it's a little bit more user friendly, but I just find that's not very helpful and that's why I like to have it open on the laptop or the PC when I'm using that. And then finally, the month view. There we go again, I can't see everything that's going on. This can sometimes be helpful if I want to jump into a particular month. But typically speaking, if I just go back to the view, the easiest thing for me to do there is just to go back to my home screen. I've got my calendar there and then I'll just jump in to the day from there. I just find that a lot easier. That's the views on the foam. 15. Create an Event in The Web App: Okay, in this video, we're going to look at how to create events in our calendar. Now, this is really important because everything we're going to be learning in this system is all hanging off of adding events into your calendar. Now, it sounds really simple, and you would have seen me do it in some of the other videos already. But there are a lot of options within events. So I want to show you how to add an event and how you can manipulate them a little bit as well. And we'll go into more detail and actually changing events and that kind of thing in a later video. First of all, let us first just find somewhere to add an event. So I'm just going to go a week ahead here. Click 17 January, around the middle of the month. Let's say I need to add an event for 09:00 I simply find the time in the calendar, the 09:00 line is there, so I'm going to click just below it. And there's an event added at the moment. It's not saved into the calendar. I need to give it a name. I also need to adjust the time. By default, I have my calendar set to a 30 minute, 30 minute time box when I add an event, but you can adjust that in the settings if you want a longer or shorter box, I find 30 minutes works just about fine for me. There's a couple of ways you can do this. You can either click along the bottom line of that event and just drag it down to make it bigger or up to make it smaller. I have mindset to 15 minute in increments, which I think is it works perfectly. Because if you're putting something in the calendar, it's probably something that's going to take a minimum of 15 minutes by the time you've started something and you've got working on it and you finished it. Realistically, it's probably going to be about 15 minutes. You can click and drag to make it bigger, smaller, the same for moving the day. Maybe we want it on a Tuesday instead of a Wednesday. Maybe we want on a Thursday, 10:00 Instead, we just click and drag and let go, and it moves there. This is a obviously an example in the web version of Google Calendar. This doesn't work quite the same in the Android app, but I like to use this web version. When I'm working, I just find it's so easy to refer to, so easy to add things more. Use the calendar just to check what I've got going on on that particular day or add something in on the fly when I'm out on the road. We've added our event. We need to give it a title. I'm just going to say important event. There we go. So given it a title, then we've got a couple of options there. Event, task, reminder. An event is really what we're going to be working with. I don't really use tasks or reminders, I've experimented with them. But I've just always found that having a task is like having a to do list. When you add a task, it goes up to the top. It doesn't actually go into the calendar, so you're not blocking off time to do, it doesn't really work. And reminders are similar. We always go with event, then we can change the time and the date, just the same as dragging it around here. But let's say for example, we need to move it to next week. Well, in that case it's a little bit more difficult to drag it. I'm just going to click the time and I'm, you can see here, light blue circle is where we are with the event right now. And the dark blue is the day we're currently in right now. For me it's 14 January. But the event is scheduled at the moment for 19 January. Let's change that to the 25th. There we go. Now we're in the 25th. You can update the time here as well if you want to. Let's say at the moment it's finishing at one. Let's say we want to finish at two, it's 4 hours. But again, I just find it easier to drag and drop like that. Then we've got an option to say, is it an all day event? If I say that it's an all day event, it actually comes off of my timeline and it goes along the top. I'm just going to click on that so you can see it's jumped up here. And I tend to use that for more reminders and things like that, but we'll cover that in more detail in future lessons, all day events go at the top, you'll see as well the public holidays, if you're using a public holiday calendar, that will be along the top as well. So I'm going to keep that down the bottom. Then we've got repeat. There's a repeat function here. If you click on that, it gives you a few quick pick options daily, weekly on a Wednesday, because obviously this is on a Wednesday. If I move this here to a Thursday and click that again, a weekly on Thursday, on the fourth Thursday, probably this is the fourth Thursday of this month. It gives me a few quick pick options every weekday, not the weekends, which is handy sometimes. And then custom. If I click on custom, there's a few more options there as well to customize that. But we'll probably look at repeating events in a separate video. That's how you add repeating events. Find a time is a handy little feature right now, it's not so useful because we can see the timeline. I'm not going to click on it right now. I believe it's going to change the view of the event that we have right now. But what it will basically do if you click on that. Box will go over to the left hand side and then it will show you the day view of specific days. And it will just let you check there, but we can see the whole week there. We don't need to define the time view. Then we've got a guests. You can click in there and you can put the e mail addresses of people you want to invite to that event. If you want to invite anyone throughout the system, you're going to learn that you don't need to invite people to these events. Some of these things are just about blocking time to get work done. You can add guests there, add a Google meet video conference as well if you need to. There's plug ins and things you can get. Our add ins you can get for Google Calendar as well like Zoom. So you can have another button there that says a invite to your meeting invitation. If you're inviting everyone by default, if you've got a Google account, you've got Google meet. I think if you've got it, use it. Do you need a zoom account? Maybe not. Most people are familiar with video conferencing and things Now then we've got location really easy. We can just put a location there. Let's say Lin, let's pick a specific place in Dublin. Let's think of a hotel in Dublin. Maybe we'll say the Mold hotel and we'll say in Dublin, I'll just look on that list. Let's say the Malden Hotel in Smithfield. Now you can see the details, the address, and everything of the Malden Hotel. It's pulled it from Google Maps and that's there. That can be really handy if you've got to get somewhere. If you've organized a meeting with someone when we've finished editing this event and we just click on the event to view it, that will be there as a link to Google Maps so we can click on it. And even if we're on the phone, it's really handy because we can open Google Maps on the phone and give us directions to where we're going. I find that really useful. I'm just going to leave that in there for now, I think. Then we've got description. I find that when I'm creating events, if there's quite a lot of things that I need to remember, sometimes I block out time to do specific list of things. Then I'll put the specific things I need to do there. If I'm inviting other people, I put a description there, just an outline of what we're going to be talking about. And you can add attachments as you can see and you can format the text. I don't always do that. Normally if I'm doing something for myself, I'll normally put the description of the title in a way that I understand it that I know what has to be done in that time. Then the last part here that we can see, at least in this view, is the particular calendar that this belongs to. If you've got multiple Google calendars, you can actually click here and you can choose a different calendar. At the moment, I don't have this set up with a different calendar, but you can click a drop down there and choose a different calendar you want it to be in. Then you can choose a color. A color is like a category, so you've got a few different colors there. I have a way of using those, which I'll describe in another video. But if you want to change the color, one thing I will say is anything that I really want to stand out, that I really want to remember. And it's important and it must happen. I must remember that it's there. I must see, it must be visual. Click that red one and you can see that just changes to red. Then there is a way, I think, to find all the ones that are red and that thing. Then we've got busy. You can set whether this time, you can put that time in the calendar, but you can actually say that it's free time. You could be just blocking time in the calendar that is free time specifically to meet clients or something like that. If you're working with other people, they would then be able to see that as available time. They would be able to schedule time with you in your calendar. That's the reason that you might want to do that. But generally speaking, I would keep most of the time, 99.9% of the time an event in the calendar will be busy time. Then we've got the visibility. Is it public? Is it private? I think by default everything's set up as private. But that just means that if you're sharing your calendar with someone else, they will see this block in your calendar. If it's on private view, it will just say event, I think, something like that. It's just a generic thing, actually. Do what it says. It says busy, busy, or free. If you put it public, then they can see exactly what the details of the event are. That's useful to know as well. Then reminders, how soon before you want to be reminded. If you've got the app, you'll get the Android app, you'll get notifications on your phone. If you're sitting at the computer and you've enabled pop ups, you'll get at whatever time you've decided there and you can have multiple reminders. And there's also an option there to do custom reminders with either E mail, a pop up notification that you would think is all the options. But there's actually more, which is why we needed to do a separate video just on creating events. Just to give you an idea of all the different things you can do. Typically we will just be adding a title and we'll be adjusting the time and maybe setting it to repeat. But it's a good idea to give you an overview of all the options available. Now if I click more options, you can see that little event rectangle with the details has now gone full screen. This is what I was afraid of happening earlier because I just wanted to go through the things that were in that box. We've got a lot of the same information here. We've got the date, the two from, it's laid out slightly differently. We've got to find time. So you can see, this is how this looks here. You can go through the different days, or you can look at a weak view, but we could see that anyway, before we've got the location, the notifications, the category diary, all that kind of stuff. But we've also got a few more things here on the right hand side about the guests. We would have a list of guests here. If we've invited other people, we've got the permissions for the guests as well. Do we allow them to update this event if they're using Google Calendar as well? Can they actually change the event themselves? Can they invite other people? Can they see the other people who are invited to this event? They're the extra options that you have here. If you're using a paid version of Google Calendar, one of the Google workspace levels, then you will probably have a couple of other things here as well, but they're the extra things that you have in the free version of Google Calendar. I hope that's been useful and I'll see you in the next video. Actually, before I go, as you just say, you click save to add the event tier calendar. Most important, don't forget to do that. Just before I go again, I'll just show you creating another one there and the option there, see the bottom there to save. I'll just say test. I'm really going. 16. Create an Event in The Android App: Okay, so we're going to quickly cover how you do the event creation in the Android app. It's much the same as it is on the web version, but the features are a little bit more limited. I'm not going to go through all the options again. I'm just going to show you how I do it. We're looking here at my widget, which I like to use. We've been using 26 January, so I'm just going to click in there. That brings up 26 January. So as you can see, I can look at the events that are going on on that date. And maybe I want to add something in for 01:00 in the same way as I did it on the web app. I'm going to click just below the 01:00 a line. And you can see a rectangle has appeared. Now I can see the little circular handles there. I'm just going to click and drag that out to make it bigger or smaller. I believe I can hold and drag it up and down. I think I can drag it from left to right as well. Yeah. If I want to do it the next day instead of the day before, where we go, we'll put it at 12:00 on the 25th instead. That's the event sectioned off. Let's say now we want to add the details. You can see there's a gray bar at the bottom which there's no title. So I'm just going to click on that. Now I can add my title. So I'm just going to tap on Title. And I'm going to say this is a new event, obviously. We would put something a little bit more useful if we were doing this for real. Then we've got the calendar that it's appearing in. So I've got a few other calendars on the phone set up. I wasn't using any extra ones in the web browser for the demo. You can see how that would look. So I could pick a different calendar or a different account. Basically, if I wanted to do that, I can choose here. If it's an all day event, I can change the times, I can do the repeating like I did before. I can add the people, I can add Google Meet if I want to, or remove it. I can add a location, I can add my notifications, my color, if I want to do a specific color like I did before, a specific category description. Always really useful if you're booking meetings with people to let them know what it's all about. Then add an attachment that's pretty much it there, all the options you get on the phone. I'm just going to click save. I'm not going to forget this time. There we go. That's the event saved there. If I want to open that event and look at it, there is if I want to edit it, I can click the little pencil icon and I can edit the event and click Save again. That's pretty much how you add events into the Android. I'll see you in the next video. 17. Rescheduling Events in The Web App: In this video, I'm going to show you how to reschedule events. As we know, life doesn't always go to plan and sometimes we need to move things around. It's very simple in Google Calendar, and you've already seen me do it when we created an event. But I just thought it was important to do a video on rescheduling just because it's an important thing that you need to know how to do in case you skipped ahead as well. I know that you might have from the creating an event because you already know how to create an event in Google Calendar. But there might be things there that you didn't know. Maybe you have a look at that anyway. But in case you didn't, in case you're unsure, very intuitive. It's really in the web version, it's more or less the same thing as we saw before, that we can just hold the mouse down, click and drag things around. That important event that's very important is actually not happening on the 26, maybe it's happening on the Wednesday. I can just click and drag it down there and let go. That has now been rescheduled. If someone was invited to that event, it pops up with a message asking if we want to let them know, and obviously we do. We're just going to see what happens when we do that. Let's click on the demo syncing event. We're going to edit this one. This is how you edit the event. There's another way, obviously, of rescheduling that you edit and you go in, you change the information here manually. You can see now we can't see the calendar view. Of course, we could use our find time view. We can click there and we can pick a different time. You can see at the moment, it's shaded in gray here, that's where the event is at the moment. We could say actually maybe 09:00 would be better, or maybe 10:30 will be better. We can use this find time view to go through and find other time slots in our calendar. Let's say 09:00 on actually say 10:00 because we're not free at nine on the 26, we'll say 10:00 Then we can go back to event details. So it's updated the information here at the top. Let's add someone in here. I'm going to add myself. There we go. I'm now invited to this event. Now it's asking me if I want to manage settings for the Google meet. We don't need Google meat for that. We can just click here to get rid of Google meat. Now there's somebody invited to this event. I'm just going to click Save. And you can see it's coming up with an option to let them know. Would you like to send invitation e mails to Google calendar guests? I would say as a good rule of thumb, you should always click Send. If you're unsure if you thought you've done something wrong, you can click back to editing, to continue editing, or make a change. But as soon as I click Save, then we are going to click Send, and that will actually send me an invitation. It will appear on my Google calendar, but it will also send me an e mail invitation to let me know that I've been invited. Let's move that now. We'll just move the easy way. Click and drag. Move it back down here. Now you can see it's telling me that other people have been invited to that event. And do I want to let them know? You can add a message here as well, just saying the reason that you move the event. And then you can choose to either cancel, not move it. Actually, I didn't want to move that there. I am going to move it there. You can choose to send, which means they don't get updated, they don't get any notifications, it doesn't update in their calendar. Or you can click Send. If you click Send and they're using Google Calendar, it will get updated. Send them an e mail notification to let them know. That is the best practice. That's the thing that you normally do. There can be reasons that you don't send it. Say for example, I have used that before where I've booked meetings with people for whatever reason the meeting didn't take place. I did that work at a different time. I was just putting it in there for reference to that person so that they knew what was happening and they didn't need to know that it was done earlier or whatever the reason is. So I just drag it down there and don't update them in their calendar. They still see that it's going to happen the next day, but they weren't going to attend or whatever the reason is. Sometimes there are reasons why you might not want to update other people. That's how you reschedule in Google Calendar on the web. Now let's look at the Android. 18. Rescheduling Events in The Android App: As always, I am on my home screen. I've got my widget there. I'm just going to click into what we're looking at. We're looking at 25 January. Click into there, we can see my events. We can see my demo syncing event. If I want to move that event here, I believe I can click and hold my finger on the screen and I can drag it up and down left and right just as before. Let's move it up to 11:00 the next day and let go just the same. It's asking me, do I want to send a notification to the person I've invited? Don't send or cancel. I'm just going to click Send. And it's as simple as that, exactly the same way as on the web version. You might have just noticed a little pop up there as well. Give me an option to undo. You get a couple of seconds to click that if you've made a mistake, but we don't make mistakes, we're just going to click on that meeting in exactly the same way. You can click the pencil icon here to edit the event. And you can change the details here as well if you want to do it that way. If you're more comfortable just changing the dates inside the actual event, you can do it that way. And click Safe. Obviously, we didn't change anything there, so we didn't get a pop up. That's how you update and reschedule events in Android. See in the next video. 19. All Day Events: In this video, we're going to look at all day events. This is something we've covered in other videos, but there are a few little nuances to it. And there's easy ways and difficult ways to add all day events. I just want to show you what all the options are and you can decide what works best for you. All day events, as I've mentioned before, are events in your calendar which you don't need to schedule time to do. I use them, at least as reminders, you can use them to block off in particular days to make that busy time. But I find that's not a very visual way of doing it. I like to actually just add an event for the whole day. But anyway, public holidays is a great example. It's something you probably want to be aware of, but you don't need to block the whole day off. There might be things on that particular day you want to put in the calendar to do. How do we add an all day event? I would say the difficult way, which is the one we've seen already, is if I click anywhere on the white space on the day that I'm having that event, I can click anywhere. This is an all day event at the moment. It's just in my calendar. But what I need to do is in this area over here where the time and the date is, I can just click in there and it reveals this checkbox all day. I'm going to click on that, and you can see it's jumped up to the top here. I can click Save, and that all day event is now saved. You can move the all day events by holding and dragging, just like we have with other things before. Drag it back there, as soon as you let go, it's saved in the calendar. There are a limit to the number of things that you can display in your all day event area or all day event bar. At the top, I think it's a maximum of three items, if I remember correctly, then you can add more than that. But it will actually just show a little message that says two more items or three more items, however many more there are. When you click on that, the bar at the top will drop down and it will show you all of those items. I'll just give you an example of that. Now, adding an event in a different way. Another way of adding an all day event, probably I would say is the easy way, is to click up above the number, above the date number. If you click the date number, I'll just do it as an example. It will bring you to the day view. I want to see the week go back to the week, clicking above it where it's got the day of the week. Click up there, you can see a day event pops in there. I say this is another event, and click Save. Let's add another one. This is yet another event. Say yet another all day event. We've got three up there at the moment. We're going to add one more. We'll say this is my fourth all day event. Clicks. I got that wrong. Oh no, I see what's happened here. The limit is three. But I think I clicked on this to reveal all of the events before when I was preparing for this video. You just notice on the left hand side here, and this is the reason I was actually going to show you this. There is a little icon there that says claps all day section. That's the little icon, if you've dropped it down to see all of the all day events there, to hide it again, you just click on that icon and it goes up. So yeah, it was three. If you've got three there, it shows all three. And when you go beyond three, it tells you how many extra there are. We can see two, and we know there's two more. Click 22 more, and it displays them there. That's easy. And the difficult way to add all day events, I could say actually there's one more way. I didn't mention this either actually, for adding events is the create up here. You can add an event up here, but it just really shows you the same as what we were looking at before. That's the other way of adding an all day event. Click here and it's the same as what we've already seen. I hope that's useful. We will now look at the Android app, which works in much the same way. Okay, I fired up my Android app, and I'm already in the date that we were looking at, which was Wednesday, 25 January. I can see straight away that it's already synced across from my web version of Google Calendar. You can notice that there's a little drop down icon on the top left hand corner, just below where it says Wednesday the 25th. If I click on that, it reveals the other all day events that were hidden. Again, I can click that to hide them as well. We can add things into the all day events just in the same way that we could on the web version. I'm just going to go to a different day here. I can click any of the white space, I can click to give it a title. And I can toggle on All Day Event and that will become an all day event. I'm going to discard that. I can use the plus which is the same on the web version as click and Create in the top left hand corner, choose a event and it's exactly the same as before. I can toggle on all Day event and set the dates here, and click Save exactly the same as we just saw. I'm going to discard that as well. Then at the top of the schedule here, where the time schedule ends, we can see 1,700 at the top, At the moment, on the 26. See there's some gray space beside 26 February. So I'm going to click into that or tap into that gray space. And you can see that that's created the outline of an all day event. I can give that a title and you can see it's much the same as we saw before. This is a day event. There we go. Click save. That has appeared at the top of the calendar. That's now just literally just appeared in my web version as well. The only difference really here is that you can't click and drag all day events in the web app like you can in the web version, the Android app, as you can in the web version. If I click my finger on that all day event, I can't drag it to the left to the next day. I can't drag it to the right the day before. I have to click on it and click the pencil icon in the top right hand corner. And then edit the date. Let's change that to the 27th. Click okay. Click Save. Now if I scroll over to the 27th, you can see that's there and that's updated in the web app as well. I can see that on my screen there as well. So that's how you create all day events. And I'll see you in the next video. 20. Categorising Events: Let's have a quick look at how we change the colors and set the categories of calendar events. We've got a few set up here. You can see social media here. All I have to do is click on that event. If I've got one that's already set up, click the little pencil icon on the event, edit the event. Then you see down here, straight away, we can see the name of the calendar that this is in, and the color or the category. If I click the little drop down next to that, we can see there's a few different colors there. Let's take blueberry for example. This is now blueberry. I want it to be basil green, whatever that is. That's all I have to do. And then I click Save. It asks me, do I want to change just this event or all of the following events? This one and everything after or all events. I'm just going to do just this one for the time being. Maybe I want my social media to be green for some reason. Let's, there's one here that just says test. Let me just click on that, do the same edit. Come over here, I've got the event color there. I'm just going to change that to tomato and click Save. Now you can see that obviously wasn't a repeating event because I didn't get that message. Now that event there is in red, it's really obvious to me and that's standing out in case I need to know that that's something important. What about if I'm creating an event? Let's create an event. Event up here at seven. Let's put that in there. Drag out for an hour. Exactly the same way. We've got the details here of the event. And down here beside my name, we've got the color. I can just click on that, which expands the options. And then again, I can click on the different colors. Let's go for grape. For this one, let's make this a repeating event. Just so that you can see that this does go across with all the repeating events. Let's say that it is going to repeat daily. That's it. Save, there you go. They're all grape color. If I want to change just one of those, like before, I can click on it, click the pencil icon, and then change the color. Let's change it to banana and click Save Now, because this is a series, it's asking me to want to change just that one, everything. After all events I'm going to do. In this case, I'm going to do all events just so you can see what happens. Then click okay. You can see now they've all changed to yellow. So it doesn't matter which one I clicked on to do that. If I choose all events, they all change. If I choose just one, just that one changes. And if I change this and all the following events, then that one and everything after it will change. It's as easy as that. Setting the colors of the different events is so easy. 21. Time Zones: In this video, I want to talk to you about time zones. You may have noticed when I created an event or when I created an all day event, there was an option to select a time zone. Generally speaking, I don't use this feature, I don't think I've ever used this feature. But I wanted to just tell you what it was about in case you have a need for it, in case it will help you. Let's just create an event by clicking anywhere on the calendar. I'm just going to drag that out to an hour long. Now I'm going to click on this information panel here. I'm going to click the Time Zone area, which reveals the time zone option next to all day event. Click Time Zone. This allows me to select a time zone. Let's click here. I'm in Ireland. That's zero GMT. But let's scroll down the list and find somewhere that is. Plus we've got a Berlin, for example. Berlin is 1 hour ahead. They can click Okay. Now, any of the information I change in this window here will be the time zone that I have chosen. I'm choosing to edit this for 07:00 A.M. The time zone I'm selecting is Berlin, which is 1 hour ahead of me. 07:00 there will be 06:00 for me. And if you look to the right here, you can see that that is set to 06:00 My time, I'm just going to say this is my time zone event, just so we don't get confused here about what this is. That's 67. If I change this now to say I'm going to change this now to this is Berlin time, they say. Our contact says, actually I'm free at 08:00 my local time We say, Okay, no problem. 08:00 local time. I've put that in my diary and it's automatically gone to 07:00 because our diary is in our local time always display. It will show up to us in our local time, but we can choose the date in someone else's time zone, the date and time. Another thing we can do here, which is really useful, is if we're working in different time zones, we can use the Finder Time options. I'm just going to click Find Time. Now what you'll notice is there are two time lines shown on this rolling schedule. You can see it's flashing here 08:00 We were doing that 08:00 at our time when you're working in this view. Just to make things more complicated. Well, I suppose it's not more complicated because when we were looking in the calendar view, the calendar you will always display in our local time. Let's say they say to, it says plus one GMT there. Can you do 01:00 P.M. My time. Scroll down here. I have something in there at plus GMT in that time zone, 01:00 P.M. I have something there. I can't do that. That's 12:00 My time can't do that. Can I do three? Yeah. 03:00 My time I've got a blank space. 03:00 there, Local time. I've got three. That's 02:00 my time. If I wanted to, I could actually, I don't think even need to drag it down. I think I can just click here now. That is scheduled for that time there, that's 03:00 there time. If you look on the left hand side that is displaying in their time zone. As soon as I click Save, we can scroll down. We can see that's the two to three hour time. If I click on it, it's still showing me our time. But if I click Edit, it's showing me the time zone. That's three to four Berlin time click. It's as simple as that. And I'm not going to show you the Android version of doing this because it works in exactly the same way. I hope that's been useful. You'll see in the next video. 22. Repeating Events: In this video, I'm going to show you repeating events or how to repeat events so that you don't have to add them manually all the time. This is really good for setting up routines, which is something I'm going to go into in a later video. Let's just jump straight in. It's not a case that you have to add an event here. And then if you're doing that the same day, the next day, add it here again, and the next day here again. You can do this automatically. We're going to work smarter here. What we're going to do is we're going to add an event. It's going to be an hour long, we're going to call it social media. Maybe it might be that you want a section time off to do social media work or social networking. We're going to click down here where it's got the time zone and does not repeat. I'm going to click there. Then you'll see there's an option here that says does not repeat. And we're going to click there to see that list of repeating the short list. It's like a quick pick list. It might be that we want that to repeat every day if we want that to happen. For example, I have a routine, my morning routine. I don't specify everything that happens in that routine. But how long do I give myself to get up in the morning, get washed and dressed, and have breakfast? That's my morning routine happens every day. That would go in as daily. Now, the system is going to help us a little bit. It's going to pick up that this is scheduled on a Wednesday, so it's going to suggest, do you want that to repeat every week on a Wednesday? Do you want to repeat on the fourth Wednesday of every month? This must be the fourth Wednesday. Yeah. Do you want to repeat on the last Wednesday of every month? It must have picked up that this is the last Wednesday. That's very useful. Do you want it to repeat annually on 25 January or do you want it to repeat every day except the weekends, Monday to Friday, every day. There are some quick pick options, but I also have some custom options there as well. I click on custom. This is where we can make things a little bit more complex. I've got that scheduled on a Wednesday. Maybe I want to do social media for an hour every Wednesday and every Friday. I want that to happen every week is how it's set up at the moment. If I was to click done, it's never end Wednesday and Thursday every week I'm going to have this in my calendar. Let's just do that and see how it looks. Click Done and then click Save. You can see now that's appeared on the Wednesday where we first put it in, and on Friday, let's go ahead to the next week, Wednesday and Friday. Next week, Wednesday and Friday. Let's say now that I want to reschedule one of these, maybe this Wednesday, I know I can't do social media at that time. Maybe I need to move it to the afternoon or maybe I need to move it to another day. That's all right, these are all linked together, but I can adjust individual ones as well. I can just click and drag. Let's say drag it down to 02:00 P.M. let go. Now it's asking me because this is a linked series of repeating events, do I want to edit that event? Do I want to change them? Everything that's ever been set up for that repeating event to that time. I want to move all events after this, that time. In this case I'm just going to say just this event and click okay, that's now down there. Let's go ahead to the next week. And let's do the same again, drag this down to 12. This time we can say, let's do it for all following events because just my schedule has changed and it's more convenient to do it at 12. Now this and all following events, click okay. You can see the next one has moved. And if I go forward through the following weeks, they're all now at that time, if I choose update, all even the ones that came before this would have updated as well, which generally you don't want to do that. That's how you reschedule those. Lets do you edit and we actually let's create a new one. It's probably easier. Something else we might do every week on a Thursday. Let's add that in there. Let's do this for an hour as well. Is maybe some admin, whatever that may be. We're going to click on Does not repeat again, and the dropdown, and we're going to do custom again. We can change how often this repeats. We've got some options here. We could do it every two weeks. The next week it won't be in there, but the following week it will. We can change that to as many as we want. We can change the week to per day. We want it to repeat every day. Maybe we want it to repeat every other day. Maybe we want it to repeat two months on monthly, on the second Thursday. We've got all these options and you can just customize this as you feel fit. I'm going to change that back to days just to make this simple. The last option I'm going to talk about here is just that when it ends option we did never, which means it just goes on until you tell it to stop. We might look at that again just before we finish up. Let's finish on a specific day. Let's say it repeats every day, once every day, until a specific date. At the moment, we have it scheduled in for Thursday, 2 February. I'm just going to go back to here Thursday the second, let's say that it finishes on the fourth. Now, I was always a little bit confused about this, does mean that it doesn't appear on that date. It will finish so that it won't happen anymore from the fourth. But what it actually means is that's the last date that it will appear. If I put the fourth and click done, I must be in the wrong date. Let's go back to January. Was it the fourth here? Admin? I haven't click Save, that's why click Save. Now it's appearing every day until the fourth. We could go in and adjust that schedule so we can click on the first one. We need to do repeat here. You can see daily until the fourth custom. We might change that now to the fifth click and this time room, click, save it. Just asking me again, do I want to update this and the following events or all events? In this case, I'm just going to choose all just to keep it simple. But I was on the first event anyway, so even if I used the first one, it would have been the same. I'm going to click okay. Now you can see that's going out until the Sunday. Now let us look at deleting an event. Because I mentioned, let's go forward because we've got this social media one that's repeating every week. Let's say now I want to cancel that. Let's just take this one here. I'm, I've clicked on it. I'm going to click the delete event icon. I'm going to now this and all following events. If I choose just this event, obviously just that one would be deleted, but the other ones would still be there. But this is how I end an event which is going on forever. So I'm just going to click okay. Now if I go to the following weeks, you can see that's gone from those weeks there. Let's go back to where we were here with our admin events. We can just edit that again. Click on it, click the pencil icon, click the repeating schedule. Up here, click Custom. And there was another option here, which was to end after a certain amount of occurrences. Let's go to here and let's say End after three occurrences. And click Done and click Save. And I'm going to, again, apply this to all events. You can see it goes in three times and then it ends whichever works best for you. If you've got something, I've used this before for a holiday, I like to block the time off physically in my holiday, I could use an all day event, but I just like to see that the time is filled in my calendar. I might do this, let's do that actually as an example. The final example here then will be, if I go across to the next, per the next month, the next week, I'm going to delete these ones because I've got a holiday coming up. I'm going to say this event and I'm going to delete this event as well. Let's say yeah, delete this event. I normally just do it something like five until any time when people are likely to try and book time with me, five to eight, I'm going to say holiday, I'm going to choose repeat, not time zone. That was a mistake. The repeating schedule custom. I know I'm going away for five days. Let's just change that to five. I'm going to make sure I change the top here as well to days, because if I did once every week, it's set to Tuesday, so it would go in for the next five Tuesdays. I just need to make sure I change that today. I'm doing this for days and I'm going to click Done. Remember to click Save Now Holiday is in there. My time is all booked off and it's gone for 123 for five occurrences. That's where you might want to use the occurrence option. I hope that's been useful. It works much the same, the Android app as it does here. So I'm not going to show you that here. But if you do want me to show you that, you can message me and I can create a video for that. But I think if you've got to this stage, if you're at this level, now we're at the intermediate level, you probably can figure out how to do that in Android. I'll see you in the next video. 23. Multiple Calendars: In this video, I'm going to explain how you can work with multiple calendars. This might not be applicable to everyone, but I certainly use this where I've got multiple Google accounts, I've got a personal account, I've got a business account. I can manage those activities. I can layer them up on my screen. Let's talk about how you can do this and some of the features that are available. So you can see on the left hand side here, we've got my calendars, the blue one there. By default, that's your, that's all your calendar entries, your events for this account. Then we've got birth days, Birthdays is actually pulled in from your Google contacts. If you look over here on the right hand side, we can see the contact icon. When you add contacts, I think Google might actually add contacts in there automatically, people who send you e mails. But you can go in there and you can add in new contacts. And there's an option there to add birthdays. And that's where that pulls that information from. If, if you're looking at this and you've played around with it and you're wondering how to add birthdays, you add them into your contacts. I'm going to un that, don't use that reminders. If we set any reminders, we can turn those on and off. If we've got any tasks, we can turn those on and off so they disappear from the calendar. Don't have any of those in here yet. Holidays is one that we saw as well. Let's go to 16 February, sixth of February. I think we have something in there. Yep. Bridget State, we could turn that off if we wanted to not see public holidays. Let's add a new calendar. We could add in another Google account if you've got a personal account. And that would show up here on the list as well. But I'm not going to do that here. I'm just going to add a new calendar. Let's create a new calendar. I'm just going to call this one personal tasks. You can add a description in there to say what it is all about, what time zone it's in. Who's the owner only have one Google account set up on this browser. I don't have any options there to choose anything, but I can now click Create Calendar. We'll just take a second for the calendar to be created. Personal tasks created successfully. So we can see that they're on the left hand side. We're actually in the settings here. You can see and personal calendar has shown up here. Let's jump back. Just click this arrow in the top left corner. We're back in our Google calendar. Now we can see Ashley Bell, and we can see personal tasks. Let's go to a day. I put in some holiday here. Let's go to a day where we don't have any holiday in there. Something I mentioned before was taking out the bins. Something that we don't want to do, but we have to do it. If we're struggling, let's create a routine. Maybe that happens every Wednesday at, let's say 07:00 P.M. I've clicked in there to add that, I'm just going to type bins. I'm going to scroll down and we might actually just make that 15 minutes, just make that smaller like that. Now I just click here where it says Ashley belt and now you can see there's two options before when we went here, there was no dropdown in all the other videos you've seen. If you've watched the videos before this, there's no option here to select another account or another calendar. Now there is. I'm going to click Personal Tasks. You can see that's changed color by default. We can select a default color in the settings, but by default that is now green. We can change the color here if we want to, but you'll notice if I change it to red for example, can you notice there, there's a small green slip or small green line down the side? And the same if I pick something else and change that red as well, because this is default color of this one up here. The social media is the default color of my regular calendar, let's say. That will keep a little blue line down the side just to indicate to me which calendar that belongs to. If I do change the color, let's just change this back to green. That's perfect. We can actually, we're going to say it happens every Wednesday. Let's just recap on how we repeat that weekly on Wednesday. And click that is a personal thing that's in there. Now we're going to start to add other more personal things as well. It might be that on a Saturday at 11:00 A.M. I like to some cleaning and you can see by default it goes in as my regular calendar. So I'm just going to say cleaning. I'm going to set that to repeat every Saturday. And I'm going to say that that is in the Personal Tasks calendar, click Save. That's it, that's gone in there. Now we can see the benefit of this because we've got two types of entries, two different colors. Obviously, we can change the colors normally if we want to, but we can also just hide the personal tasks if we want to. Let's just click the tick box on the left hand side and all those things are gone. It's a good way of me being able to see what personal things do I have to do. Business things that I have to do are vice versa. That's how you manage two different calendars if you want to use and you can have as many as you want. Another way you might use this, and I've tried to use this in before, in the past before, didn't exactly work perfectly for me. But if you're doing social media and you want to schedule to create a plan of social media posts that you're going to create or you're going to send out. Well, maybe you can have a social media calendar here and you just add the posts in like this. That's another way that it could be useful to you. I hope that's been helpful and I'll see you in the next beginning. 24. Reminders: In this video, I'm going to talk to you about reminders and how to create reminders for your Google calendar events. I've got a very particular view on this, let's get straight into it. This isn't going to be a very long video. The main message is, why do you need reminders? Because you should be looking at your Google calendar every day. You should be looking at it probably every hour, every couple of hours, to see what's going on. Your Google calendar is your reminder. But if you need to set reminders, this is how you do it. Let's click on something here, social media, or click Edit. We're going to come down to notifications. We've got a notification by default. It will always notify you 30 minutes before. Well, you can actually change that in the settings if there's something you prefer. I don't mind having a pop up just 30 minutes before popping up, reminding me what is coming up. If I'm working on the computer here on the PC or on the laptop, I get a little pop up in the right hand corner saying, 30 minutes this meeting is going to start or this activity is going to start. I don't mind that. Same thing happens on the phone. You get a push notification, it pops up on the phone, That can be useful. There's never an occasion I feel that you need to send an e mail reminder to yourself. If you're following the system that I'm teaching here, you should be looking at your Google calendar all the time. Doesn't necessarily have to be the weak view, but on your phone you've got the daily schedule, the rolling schedule of everything that's happening. You should be clued in. That's something you should be looking at in the morning. Something you should be looking at in the evening to prepare for the next day. E mail notifications are an absolute no For me, we don't want to create more work by sending ourselves e mails. We're creating more work for us to do. We're creating more information, we have to manage the pop ups aren't too bad. Sometimes if I'm recording a video, they are too bad because they interfere with the video. But generally speaking, if you have a pop up, that's fine. But notifications keep them to a minimum. You're looking at your calendar all the time, so you don't need them. That's the end of the video, the next one. 25. Google Calendar in Gmail: In this video, I want to show you how you can combine Google Calendar with mail. When you use these two together, it's really useful for scheduling things that are coming up in your e mails that you want to easily refer back to from your calendar. I'm going to show you two ways of doing it. One is the kind of, I would say the official way and the other one is my way, which is obviously the better way of doing it. Let's jump over to Google Calendar by clicking the waffle on up here and choosing mail from the list. Sorry, I think that's a calendar. I meant mail here. We've got an e mail, right? Really important thing. Let's click on that. Hi Ashley, I need you to do this really important thing for me. You don't need to get it done by today, but it must be done before Wednesday. Pdf instructions attached. Great, I can schedule time in the diary to do that. Let's just hide this message here as well, the Google. The official way of doing this is to click the more icon here. Click on that, and then I can create an event, which is what I want to do. I want to block time off in my diary to do this. The way that I manage this with e mails is I set aside time every day, like an hour, to go through my e mails and deal with all the things that I can just deal with then. And there always be things that need extra time. And it's really important that you don't get stuck into doing those things when you should be doing something else, which is checking your e mails and dealing with the things that can be dealt with then And there, these things that are more complicated that need time assigned to do them specifically should be scheduled in your calendar. Let's click Create Event, and see what happens. It opens up Google Calendar and then we get just our standard Google Calendar view. There's a couple of things that I don't like about this. One thing that I do like is that it's put the name of the subject of the e mail in there, which is helpful. But what's not helpful is it's added a Google meet, video chat, I can get rid of that. Also, it's invited the person who sent me the e mail a couple of times when I started doing this, I was doing it like this, but I forgot, I forgot to remove the person who sent it to me. So they got an invitation to a meeting, which was just me blocking time to do this. It does tell you if I click Save now, do you want to send this? But when zoned into what you're doing and you're like on a mission, sometimes you accidentally just click Send, Which has happened. We can get rid of that person there, but you have to remember to do that. Another nice feature here is that it's copied in the e mail. It can be nice depending on how long the e mail is, but it hasn't added the attachment. As you can see, the instructions are in the attachment. I find that this isn't really useful. I'm just going to click Save anyway. You can see now that's gone into my calendar. I'm going to delete that copy of it, and I'm going to show you how I do it. I'm going to close this calendar here. I've got the e mail open in front of me. I know that I need to set aside time to do this, probably an hour. What I'm going to do is the first thing I'm going to do is copy the URL. I'm going to just click into the URL here. It's highlighted it for me. I'm going to do Control and C on the keyboard, I think you could write click and do copy. I'll just do that here anyway. But I've done control on the keyboard to copy it. I'm going to go over to my Google calendar. Because my Google calendar will always be open. That's how I run my day. So it's always open. Now, it said I can do that any time up until Wednesday. I'm on today's date. I can see that because it's highlighted in blue, and I can also see the time here. I'm going to go over to next week. Click on Tuesday. Nothing in the calendar for next week. Let's just say, I'm going to do that on Tuesday at ten. I'm going to say, there we go, Tuesday at ten. The other reason I like doing it like this rather than just creating an event from mail is because I can see the whole week. I like that when I did it from mail, it gave me the full page display of the entry details. I couldn't see the calendar. I could do find a date or find a time option here. But this way I get to see the whole week and I can choose when it's convenient for me to do it. I can also play around a bit more as well. Maybe move it to Monday 11 instead. Anyway, then I will just type in whatever it is a task for Ashley. Better use a capital letter. There we go, task for Ashley. That just is a prompt to me to remind me what this is about. Then I click in Description. And I have in the clipboard my URL to e mail. So I'm just going to control V. Sometimes if it's very important, I might change this color here to a red. Just to remind me that this is really important, just to give me a visual indicator that this cannot be moved. This has to be done at this time. And then I'm going to click Save. The advantage of me doing this now is that when I come to Monday and I'm working through the day and I get to that task, I can click on it. And straight away there, there's a link to the e mail. As I said, most online e mail providers that I've come across that use a web based platform allow you to do this. I haven't found one yet. I've used three or four different ones, and I haven't found one that doesn't give you a unique link to each e mail. Click on that, it brings me to the e mail. There's the instructions of what I need to do. There's the PDF attached. It just makes it so much easier. It's all very well now on me putting it in the calendar and I know what it's about. But even if I had done this on the Wednesday, let's move it to Wednesday. There's two or three days before that. There's lots of things going on. The idea of this system doing things in Google Calendar scheduling your time is that you're removing things from your head. You're trying to eliminate things that you have to remember. You're trying to make life easier for yourself by me being able to just click here and click the link to the e mail. Everything I need is right there in an instant. That might have seemed like a longer way of doing it, but realistically I'm just explaining it. So that's probably why it seems longer or it may seem longer. Let me just show you that in the real time speed of me doing it, the e mail is there. I click, I read the e mail, decide that's what I'm going to do. Right? I'm going to schedule Time, copy. Come over to my calendar, write one of my free next week. Convenient time would be two. I'll book an hour for that. I'm going to say Task for Ash, and then I'm going to click Description Paste. Done, really, it's no more, no more time than doing it the other way, where you're creating a task from G mail A, creating an event from mail, it's probably actually faster. There's less for you to remember, like remembering to remove the Google meet, remembering to move the other invitee, there's no link in the other one to the e mail. I've actually probably saved time. I've saved myself time in the future as well. Because when I go here, I can just click that, go straight to the email. And it's really as simple as that. I hope that's been useful to you. And I'll see you in the next video. 26. Wrap Up: To wrap things up. Time boxing helps you improve your productivity by allocating time to actually get things done. Using an online calendar will give you a flexible portable and a visual way to organize your time in the office and on the go start by adding all of your personal routines like your morning routine, evening routine, lunches and break times. Then in the empty space that's remaining, start to add all of the things from your to do list. Once you start to add these things, don't be afraid to move them around. But once you start working on them, you must respect the time box. Set a routine at the end of each day to check what's coming up the next so that you don't get any surprises. The first few weeks are going to be the hardest as you try to work through the backlog of everything that you need to get done and eliminate bad habits like continuously checking emails and phone notifications. Finally, be conscious that you will drift and be prepared to hold yourself accountable and get back on track. That's it for now. This course is going to supercharge your productivity and it might even change your life. That's it for now, and I'm going to say goodbye to see you in the next one.