How We Use Google Calendar to Organize our Busy Lives
Like many dual income parent families, my wife and I lead a very hectic life with 3 kids that cross 9 years. We are always shuffling kids to different schools or day care or practices while both of us often have work meetings or events in the evening. We used to keep all of the appointments on a paper desktop calendar at the house and key everything into our personal electronic calendars every Sunday night for the week. This was tedious, not very real time and not easy for my mother-in-law that was involved in the children shuffle. We had set up a family Google account for family emails for schools, bills etc. One day, I finally got so fed up with the paper calendar, I looked for another solution and a free one was already available within our family Google email account. Google Calendar! Even though my wife and mother-law were not very good with new technical gadgets, it was very easy to implement into our lives and has made organizing so much easier. Here is a sample of our calendar followed by some of the solutions Google Calendar provides for our family.
Click to enlarge
- Access from anywhere – We’ve added Google Calendar as another calendar on all of our iDevices (iPhones, iPads) but also on our work computers which our companies allow us to add ashared internet calendar as view only. It overlaps with our personal or work calendars but for iDevices it shows up as a different color so you know what’s yours versus what is from the family calendar.
- Share appointments – We enter all appointments for the kids and also their after school locations as recurring appointments. Now here’s the trick; we made sure we identify which parent, grandparent or sitter was handling that appointment. We also add our appointments that may affect childcare outside of the normal business/school day like a late meeting. We can also schedule meetings from our work calendar by sending an invite to our Google email. This puts the event on the work calendar and personal calendar. As with most digital calendars, you can set your event location, set recurrence, include travel times, add multiple alert reminders and show as free or busy.
- Recurring Events – Now we have birthdays, anniversaries, holidays and recurring reminders in one place. We set birthdays and anniversaries with longer reminders so we, o.k., I don’t forget. But then we started adding other reminders like renewing memberships, maintenance items like changing air filters and smoke detector batteries.
- Alerts – You can set Google Calendar to alert or remind you of appointments with pop-up reminders or via email depending on your preferences and devices.
- Subscribe to Other Calendars – Google has included many pre-loaded calendars that you can subscribe to. You’ll then be able to see holiday calendars for multiple countries, sports calendars from many different sports and more including but not limited to phases of the moon, local sunrise/sunset, and other interesting features.
- Other features – Some other features that you may find useful depending on your need include the following:
- World Clock to show time zone in countries you select
- Enable weather forecasts
- Access your calendar offline
- Add a background picture to your calendar
I hope you find value in this post and are able to better organize your life if needed with a tool like Google Calendar. Please leave your tips in the comments and if you enjoyed this content, please signup for my mailing list and share it with others.
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