Creating healthy working habits is key to maintaining productivity and improving overall wellbeing. Without being intentional about how you manage your time and setting clear boundaries, it’s easy to become overwhelmed, leading to burnout, lack of focus and reduced productivity.
Fortunately, Google Calendar offers a variety of features to help you take control of your time and balance your workday efficiently to prioritise important tasks – whether you’re working at home or in the office. From sharing your availability with colleagues, so they know when is best to reach out, to setting aside time for focused work and using insights to optimise your schedule, we cover a range of tips, tricks and features to help you stay on track, minimise distractions and get more out of your day.
Specifically, we share tips for:
- Setting boundaries and managing availability
- Improving focus and productivity
- Monitoring and adjusting your schedule
- Respecting your colleagues’ time
Setting boundaries and managing availability
A key part of creating healthy working habits is establishing clear and predictable boundaries. Google Calendar makes this simple with several features designed to help you manage your availability and let others know what to expect when organising meetings with you.
Working hours and working location
One simple way to communicate your availability is defining your default working 🌙 hours and working 🏡 location. This makes it easier for people to understand when and where you’re available and prevents colleagues from expecting immediate responses outside of your designated work time.
To accurately communicate your availability with those with whom you choose to share your working location, you can set different working locations for portions of the day and specify in what 🏢 office building you’re located. This allows your team to more easily coordinate with you as you move between locations. It also streamlines planning for in-person meetings by helping to determine the appropriate meeting room to book, which is especially useful if your organisation has multiple office locations.
When you RSVP to a Google Calendar invitation, Google Calendar automatically determines how you intend to join based on your working location, saving you from manually selecting whether you’re going to be 👥 “in a meeting room” or 💻 “joining virtually”. If your plans change and you update your working location throughout the day, your RSVP method will automatically change too. This helps your colleagues on the Google Calendar guest list know how you and others in your team intend to join.
Out of office events
To protect your time away from your desk, schedule out of office (OOO) events in Google Calendar to let your colleagues know when you’re offline. With OOO events, Calendar can automatically decline conflicting meetings on your behalf to ensure your time away remains undisturbed; and those invitation rejections can include custom messages to explain your unavailability. Your OOO status syncs across Google Workspace apps, including Gmail, Chat and Docs, to make sure your colleagues are well-informed about your scheduled absence and return.
Appointment schedules
To make it easier for people to book meetings with you at times that work best for you, consider setting up a Google Calendar appointment schedule. This feature enables you to share your availability via a booking page which anyone can use to schedule time with you directly. It eliminates the need for back-and-forth communication and frees up time that would otherwise be spent finding, offering and managing booking slots.
There are a range of features in appointment schedules that let you customise your availability to suit your needs and help you manage your workday. This includes features such as adding buffer time between appointments, limiting the number of daily bookings and preventing last-minute bookings that can disrupt your day.
💡 Want to learn more about Google Calendar appointment schedules? Read our comprehensive guide here.
Improving focus and productivity
Focus time
After identifying your most productive times of day, consider scheduling dedicated 🎧 focus time blocks in your calendar to work on tasks requiring deep concentration. This will signal to colleagues that you’re unavailable for meetings or other interruptions and should not be disturbed unless it’s urgent.
During focus time, you can choose to automatically decline conflicting meetings and 🔕 mute Google Chat notifications to minimise distractions and make the most of your productive hours. As soon as your focus time ends, your Google Chat notifications will be automatically unmuted so that you can quickly catch up on anything you may have missed.
Your 💬 Google Chat status will also automatically update to show when you’re “in focus time” and how long it’s scheduled to last. This additional context helps set expectations around your availability and when it's best for a colleague to message you. Likewise, it makes it easier for you to identify when to message others.
💡If you’re trying to focus in a busy or loud environment, use good-quality noise cancelling headphones, such as the Poly Voyager Focus 2, to block out any distracting noises.
Speedy meetings
If you often have back-to-back meetings scheduled in Google Calendar, you may find you aren’t left with enough time to prepare for, or get to, the next one. With the 🏃 speedy meetings feature, meetings you schedule will be automatically shortened by 5 minutes for 30-minute meetings or by 10 minutes for longer ones. This helps reduce meeting 💤 fatigue and lets you and your fellow attendees have time to get settled for the next call, review notes or take a brief break.
Customise event notifications
To ensure you’re prepared for upcoming meetings, Google Calendar allows you to customise when you are 🔔 notified before events to best suit your needs. Whether you need a 5-minute warning to quickly grab a drink, a 45-minute reminder to gather notes or you want to receive an alert a day, two days or a week in advance to prepare a presentation, changing the default event notification time time gives you more control and ensures you’re always prepared – no matter what the day brings.
You can also set up multiple reminders at different intervals to help you stay on top of your schedule. For instance, a reminder two weeks before can help you mentally prepare for an important meeting whilst a reminder a day before can keep it top-of-mind.
Gemini “Attend for me” (coming soon)
If you’re double-booked or facing an unexpected conflict, you will be able to send Gemini to attend a meeting on your behalf*. This feature will allow you add any questions or comments directly to the Google Calendar invitation and Gemini will make them visible to attendees for discussion, helping get your points across despite your absence. After the meeting, you’ll receive a summary Google Doc with notes and action items to keep you informed about what you missed.
*Gemini "Attend for me" has not yet launched. Keep an eye out for updates on its release date, along with other Gemini features for Google Meet, on our dedicated resource. “Attend for me” will require select Gemini add-ons for Google Workspace.
Monitoring and adjusting your schedule
Time Insights
If you’re struggling to find the right balance between meetings and focused work, ⏰ Time Insights in Google Calendar give you a clear overview of how you spend your time. Using these insights, you can identify where you can make adjustments to optimise your schedule and be more productive.
Specifically, Time Insights let you see:
- 📊 A breakdown of your time – see how much of your time is spent in one-to-one meetings, meetings with three or more people or focus time. You can also create custom colour 🏷 labels to analyse your time based on your own criteria, such as how much time is spent in internal versus external meetings or you can have labels for each department or team with whom you meet.
- ⌚ Time in meetings – discover how much time you spend in meetings on a daily, weekly, monthly or yearly basis; your daily average; and which day of the week is your busiest meeting day.
- 👥 People you meet with – see a list of the people with whom you interact the most during a specific day, week, month or year depending on your Google Calendar view.
💡 Time Insights only tracks your booked meetings and scheduled events. It does not take into account any ad-hod calls you jump on throughout the day.
Respecting your colleagues’ time
Check colleagues’ availability
In addition to managing your own time effectively, Google Calendar offers a range of features to ensure you’re considerate of your colleagues’ schedules. For instance, instead of emailing a colleague to ask when they’re free, you can check their availability in Google Calendar (as long as they’re sharing their calendar and availability with you) to make coordinating meetings a breeze.
Propose a new meeting time
If you’re unable to attend a meeting, the propose a new time feature enables you to suggest an alternative time or date for the meeting directly from the Google Calendar invitation. This reduces the need for back-and-forth communication. The meeting host will receive an email summarising your proposed change, allowing them to easily ✅ accept or ❌ reject it.
💡 When proposing a new time, you can view the availability of all attendees (provided that they are sharing their availability with you) to find a time that works for everyone.
Add a secondary time zone
If you frequently schedule meetings with colleagues in a different time zone, you can choose to display a 🌍 secondary time zone right next to your local time in Google Calendar. This helps you better understand and respect their availability and find suitable meeting times more easily.
Discover more time management tips & tricks
Looking for general time management tips? Google’s Productivity Advisor, Laura Mae Martin, has written a range of blog posts offering expert advice on staying organised and developing a healthy work-life balance. She shares insights on how to work smarter with Google Workspace as well as practical tips for improving overall wellbeing, morale and productivity.
Take a look at some of her posts from her “Because you asked” series below:
- How Google Calendar can help boost your productivity
- Balancing productivity and wellbeing
- Managing life – in and out of the office
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