I typically live out of my exec’s calendar but here are some of the first things I do when I start a new job to get my calendar set up.
Setting my time zones:
You are able to set up 2 time zones to show up on the side of your calendar. In order to do this:
- Go to the gear icon at the top right of your calendar
- Select “Settings”
- Scroll down to “Time Zone”
- Toggle on “Display secondary time zone”
- Select your 2 preferred time zones
- You can also change the “Label” from the default to your preferred labels
It will look like this:
Setting up the world clock:
If you have a global team and / or have to schedule across multiple time zones frequently, this is a handy tool to have set up to easily set up cross-timezone calls. In order to do this:
- Go to the gear icon at the top right of your calendar
- Select “Settings”
- Scroll down to “World Clock”
- Toggle on “Show world clock”
- Select which time zones you would like to add
It will look like this:
Event Settings
Event settings is a great section to leverage in the Google calendar settings.
- Default duration: This is what the default meeting length will be when you click once anywhere on your calendar to set up a new meeting. I like to click and drag to create my meetings but you can change this to 15, 20, 30, 45, 60, 90 or 120 minutes.
- Speedy meetings: If you toggle this box on, 30 minute meetings will be 25 and 60 minute meetings will be 50.
- Default guest permissions: This is the default settings of calendar invites when you create them so you don’t have to deal with toggling the permissions each time. If you have a team that tends to get click happy with inviting other folks and meetings are getting out of hand, setting the default to only “see guest list.” If you want to give folks the freedom in general to move your calendar invites around, you can click all of the permissions on as your default.
- Add invitations to my calendar: This decides when a calendar invite you are the recipient of actually shows up on your calendar. I personally like to have all invites show up on my calendar since I work more out of my calendar than out of my email so I like to keep my default at “From everyone.”
View Options
The only thing that I like to toggle on here that is different from the default is “Show week numbers.” This is helpful when scheduling recurring meetings that are on a cadence under monthly where setting up a series on even weeks versus odd weeks would be helpful to know.
It looks like this:
How do you like to set up your Google Calendar? Have any tips or tricks that you’d like to share? Would love to hear them! Share them in the comments below..
