If you spend part of every week texting "Does Thursday at 2 work?" this one's for you. Google Calendar has a handful of settings most business owners never touch, and together they can hand back about an hour a week. Here are the five I set up first for clients.
1. Turn on an appointment schedule
An appointment schedule gives you a booking page people can use to grab open time on your calendar. You set the hours, the length of each slot, and a buffer between meetings. Then you send one link instead of five texts.
Where: Click Create, then Appointment schedule.
2. Set your working hours
Working hours tell everyone with access to your calendar when you're actually available. If someone invites you outside those hours, they get a heads-up. It's a small boundary that does a lot of quiet work.
Where: Settings, then General, then Working hours & location.
3. Change your default reminders
The default is one reminder 10 minutes before. That's rarely enough when you're driving across Knoxville to a session. Add a second reminder an hour out, or the night before for early appointments.
Where: Settings, then your calendar's name, then Event notifications.
4. Color-code by type of work
Pick a color for client work, admin, personal, and anything else you do often. When you glance at your week, you'll see in two seconds if it's all meetings and no actual work time.
Tip: Keep it to four or five colors. More than that and the system stops being useful.
5. Use separate calendars and share the right one
Create a calendar for each part of your life or business, like Sessions, Admin, and Personal. You can share your Sessions calendar with an assistant or partner without opening up everything else.
Where: Click the plus next to Other calendars, then Create new calendar.
The 20-minute setup
You can do all five in one sitting. Start with working hours and reminders since they take two minutes each, then build the appointment schedule last.
Want someone to set this up with you, along with your email and booking tools? Book a tech setup session or send me your question for a future Tech Tip Tuesday.
