Google and all of its apps can really contribute to making your life less chaotic. It already has helped my life and is still helping it everyday. This article is about Google's Calendar app, for it has been the most helpful to me, especially in my student life.
This app has proven to be the most beneficial to making my life easier. I recommend it for anyone and everyone, even if you dont check back on it much. It is extremely helpful for students. Do you students remember having those planners that you would always have to carry around and write in? Well those, in my opinion, are stupid. First off, you can not have anything repeat. You always have to check back to remind yourself of things... what if you forget to check back?! If you lose your planner it is very troublesome. It is troublesome even if you leave it somewhere and then decide you need it! Planners are dumb nowadays. Plain and simple.
Most useful aspects of google calendar:
1. Ability to have multiple calendars and color coding
2. Repeating capabilities of events and elaborate editing of events
3. Tasks list sidebar
4. Sharing capabilities
Now to elaborate on how these aspects can be useful in different situations.
1. Ability to Have Multiple Calendars and Color Coding
Making multiple calendars is the most helpful feature on this calendar system. Think about how your life is compartmentalized. Do you play any sports? Do you have any pets that need to be on a schedule? Do you have any kids who have too many activities to keep up with? Need to keep up with classes and extracurricular activities? Its all made easy if you learn to manage them all with multiple calendars. The beauty of it is that its all together and viewable at once. So lets take me and my crazy life for example. I own two puppies that have strict schedules so that they can be trained. I am in college so I have classes to keep up with as well as professors and extracurricular activities. On top of all that I work AND I have to help my parents out with my sister. So in my google calendar I have quite a few calendars:
- Class Schedule: This is the calendar with my full class schedule on it. I use it if I ever forget what class I have or if I ever need to send anyone my daily schedule.
- Auditing Schedule: This is a recent addition to my calendars. This is a schedule of all the classes I might want to audit throughout the year. This is useful so whenever I want to audit a class I dont need to look up what classes are available and where they are. Instead, it is all panned out for me ahead of time.
- Assignments: This is the calendar where I post all the assignments, quizes, and exams I have as events. With this calendar I can see what assignments are going to be due and I get started on them. With this calendar I never get a zero on any assignment, quiz, or exam.
- Office Hours: I list all the office hours of each of my professors so that I do not have to always look back at the syllabus.
- Family: Here I post my dogs' schedules and anythings that I need to attend/do for my family (i.e. take my sister to practice, go to family dinner, etc.).
- Work: Here I post my work schedule and any work events I need to go to.
- Extracurricular: This calendar is where I post any club meetings I have, any sports events I have to or want to go to, etc. Anything extracurricular goes here.
Now to make things even EASIER on us, google has given us the luxury to assign a color to each calendar. This makes viewing all or some of the calendars at once much less confusing and actually pleasing. No having to go from one calendar to another. It is all there laid out nicely.
2. Repeating Capabilities of Events and Elaborate Editing of Events
The event making features and options provided to us is just amazing. You can make events repeat in every way you can probably imagine. You can also at a description to the event and a location. You also have privacy settings and reminders that you can add to the event! With these capabilities, you wont need to even remember things about events, you can just list them in the description or something!
3. Tasks List Sidebar
I have probably used this feature second most right behind the multiple calendar feature. On your calendar you can have a little task list on the side of the screen. This is extremely useful for little things or even major things that you should do that do not or can not exactly take the form of an event. For example, something you need to do but don't have a set time to do it. Another useful thing is that you can create separate to do lists. So you can have one to do list for personal stuff, one for work, one for school, etc.
4. Sharing Capabilities
To top it all off, you can share your calendars with different people who have gmail accounts and vice versa. This is useful to compare schedules with friends, make your family more manageable, no more writing out schedules for employers, etc. The possibilities are endless. And you can also give the people you are sharing with different responsibilities such as just letting them view the calendar or letting them edit it too.
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That is an overview of the most useful things you can do with google calendar. If anyone wants a tutorial on how to set up your calendar just let me know and I will post a detailed tutorial with screenshots.
