If you only have one Google account, managing your calendar is pretty simple. But once you bring your work account, shared family calendars, and even specialty calendars into the mix, keeping things organized becomes more challenging.
Here’s an example. Say you have a personal Google Calendar where you keep track of your appointments and reminders. You also use a separate calendar for work stuff. Your spouse shares her calendar with you so you can stay in sync with each other. Perhaps your kids have school appointments you’d like to track, so you add all that to your calendar. Maybe you even add a few specialty calendars into the mix, like phases of the moon or league schedules for your favorite sport. The next thing you know, you have 17 entries for each day, and it’s tough to parse your calendar.
The good news is that there’s an easy way to clean up your calendar and manage multiple calendars and events. So take a step back, breathe, and let’s get this thing sorted.
Share Your Work Calendar with Your Main Account
This may seem like a no-brainer, but adding your work calendar to your personal calendar is the first step to managing all of your events in one place. It’s worth noting that your work account will need to be a GSuite account for this to work.
The easiest way to do this is to use the “Add a friend’s calendar” function on Google Calendar. All you have to do is type your work email into the box and go from there.
It will let you know that you don’t have access to this calendar and allow you to request access. Send the request, and then jump into your work email to confirm access permission.
Now you’ll be able to see all of your work events on your personal calendar.
Create a Google Family Account and Add Your Spouse and Kids
Instead of just adding your family’s events onto your personal calendar, a Google Family account with your spouse and kids on it is the way to go. This lets you create a Family calendar to which you can add all your family events. We have a full guide on setting up Google Family, so I’ll point you in that direction to get started. You can share a lot of Google services with your family, so it’s worth doing.
Once you have Google Family configured, you’ll see a new entry on your calendar: Family.
When you add an event to the family calendar, that event shows up on the personal calendar of each family member. It’s great for things like school events, doctor’s visits, work trips, and vacations. Everyone stays in the loop without having to share entire calendars with one other.
Toggle Your Calendars to Parse Them Quickly
This might be the best tip in the entire post: use the toggles! As your calendar fills up, it can be hard to find specific events or keep an eye on just your calendar. That’s why you have to take advantage of showing and hiding particular calendars.
To quickly hide (or show) calendars, tap the checkbox next to the calendar name. This feature is available on both the website and mobile apps.
By quickly hiding your most cluttered calendars (like Family), you can more easily see what’s happening on your calendar—don’t forget to re-enable it, though, so you don’t miss any important events!
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