Google Calendar Webinar

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• Slides from Digital Office_ Using Google Calendar to save time - tips and tricks (June 2024)

Using Google Calendar to save time in your working day: webinar transcript. 

This is a Digital Office video on the topic of using Google Calendar to save time in your working day, sharing some tips and tricks from UCD IT services. 

What we'll be looking at today is firstly briefly at the Digital Office initiative and what it's about. Then we'll discuss some time management and calendaring tips.

I'll go through some features in Google Calendar which should help save time in your day-to-day work and share some further resources.
These resources are also available below the video. 

So, what is the Digital Office?
It's an initiative sharing a toolkit of resources from UCD IT services around three themes, collaborating, time management & calendaring, and file storage & sharing.

Today's session is about time management and calendaring and we have a number of resources available on our website as well as a community on Google Chat that's open to all UCD staff and again the link is below the video and you're very welcome to join.

So first of all, before we go into Google Calendar itself: sharing some general tips about time management and calendaring from IT services. Firstly we recommend that you keep your calendar up to date - this allows your colleagues to know where you are, and when you're available. We'll look at some features on Google Calendar to let you display just that.

It allows us to to meet hybrid working needs so for example you can now indicate where your working location is on calendar, and indicate if you're out of office, for example.

It also allows us to set up a team calendar in Google Calendar to help - whether it's scheduling team meetings, noting out of office schedules and last but not least, and this is one of the goals of the Digital Office, is to minimise some of the admin tasks and emails when setting up meetings. We'll look at some features where you can share your calendar details with colleagues, and also to look at somebody else's schedule to see when they're available to book a meeting, so you can avoid some of the email back and forth. So this slide is a list of the features that we're going to look at today. There are nine features in total: seven 'standard' and two extras. and for this I will go live to the Google Calendar UI.

Again, these slides will be available underneath the video and you will find images and there are links as well to the articles where you can find further instructions about these features.

Okay so with this, I'll go to Google Calendar and I suppose starting from the beginning: to go to Google Calendar. You can find it in a number of ways. You can go to 'Google Calendar for Staff' directly from UCD Connect and it will open it there. You can also find it from any of your other Google Workspace applications: there's a little waffle icon up in the top right and you can see the Google Calendar icon is available here.

So, I'll open Google Calendar and this shows me the EAG training calendar.

The first thing that we'll look at, as described in our best practices, is you can display your standard working hours and location. You can see here in the calendar, we've 'Home' indicated here as a working location and 'Office' some of the days as well. So to set that up, you go up to the little cogwheel on the top right, to the Settings menu and click Settings.

So there are a whole set of settings here on the left, and we encourage people to explore them and make sure that your calendar is set up the right way for you. Here, we will go to the option that says 'Working Hours and Location' here on the left navigation.

So this brings me down to the options. First of all, you choose whether to enable working hours and location and this, as it says here,  people will get notified when they're scheduling meetings and if they try to invite you to a meeting outside of those hours. So you can select and deselect some of the icons here for the the days of the week.

Here, we have set up Monday to Thursday working hours and as you can see here, there's a drop-down menu set nine to five on Monday, Tuesday I've set this as a half day, Wednesday a full day and again Thursday as as a half day. So this might suit somebody for example especially that's working part time or maybe some irregular hours. You can also set your working location here, and again there's a drop-down menu. So you choose the defaults, or if you're working from the office or working from home you can select 'Unspecified' where you can set another office - if say for example, you work from another location or you know you're doing research with another institution or you can specify someplace else.

So again, that will help your colleagues to set this up if they can you know see your calendar and see your availability already.

For example, I might see that Laura is in Lyon's Farm on this day so I might schedule a meeting another day - that's just an example. So t if you're working as standard hours, you can set up one day and 'Copy to all,  which makes it quite easy, or you can go through and you can set up a different schedule for each individual day. Okay so I've seen this is all set up to my satisfaction here and so I'll go back to my calendar.

So again, you can see that I've set up Home and Office here for today, for the working location.

Those settings are if you've got like a regular schedule and regular working hours and location, but you can also do this on a day-by-day basis. If you go over to the left, you'll see a 'Create' icon here on the top left. If you click on that, it brings up a drop-down menu and one of the options here you'll see is 'Working Location'.

So this lets you do it on a more dynamic basis, so you can set this for one day. So the default goes to today, the 13th of June, and so we can choose a location: I'll choose Home for today and again there are other locations here. You'll see the default again is for 'all day' but if you want you can add a time - so I can say from say 2 to 5 pm Thursday, I'm working at home and then your working location is saved there in your calendar. 

So, as I say two ways of doing it: you can go up to Settings, find the the settings for Working Hours and Location, and set it here in a standard way, and you can override that or you can do it day by day at any stage on your calendar. As I showed here, you can click Create and select Working Location, or if you just click at the top of any day, it lets you add in a location there which is which is really handy. 

The next thing we'll look at: I'd mentioned there that that your calendar would be available to your colleagues and sharing your calendar is possible on on Google Calendar. 
So we'll go down and look at that: this is my calendar here, the EAG training calendar, so I'll click the three dots beside it and I'll click down. The first item I'm interested in here is Access Permissions for Events: by default our calendars are set up so that they are available to other colleagues at University College to view, but don't worry the default is that you see only when people are free or busy.  

So that means that somebody else at ucd.ie can look at your calendar, and see if your time is blocked off - if for example you are working in another location, they can choose whether to schedule you or not. You do have the option here, if you want to make your calendar open to be available to all of your colleagues at ucd.ie, and that's saved there. Everybody can see all of the details, and I know some people might not be that comfortable with that. So what you can do is, you can share your calendar with specific people or with Google groups as well, and this is helpful for example, if you wanted to make your calendar details available or visible to your immediate team. This can also be helpful if you want to share or delegate your calendar to somebody else - and that depends on the permissions you set. So you can see here that the EAG training calendar is is shared with a number of people, but the permission levels are a little bit different. 

Myself, Aidan and Richard have access to make changes and manage sharing - and let's look at the drop-down here: so that's the top level, if say you wanted to delegate your calendar to somebody else, so they can manage all aspects of the calendar. The other option is that they can make changes to events so they can make a change to the time and an event on my calendar. The next level down is maybe what you might want to give to to your colleagues: they would be able to see all event details so that they wouldn't be able to change and access your events, but they would be able to see for example if you just booked off some time as provisional, or that. We recommend it for for your immediate colleagues, and as I say you can add either individual team members or you can add a Google group here as well - for example, EAG recruitment@ucd.ie that has a few people included, and you can set people to only free or busy also. The good news is that you can come back here and you can update this at any time, so you can use the + button here to add people and groups, and you can share with specific people, and then you check the permission level and you can see here that I can make changes at any time. For example here I might update Aidan's permissions, so he can just see all event details. So you can see that it's very customisable and very easy to update. 

So that's how you would display your calendar to your colleagues as either blocks of busy, or maybe go in and share it so other people can see all the event details. And just to reassure people, I'll go back out of settings here,  even if you share all of your calendar details with people, you can still mark individual calendar events as 'Private'. So there was a meeting you didn't necessarily want everybody to know about it, like a HR meeting, so if I go in here and click on the calendar and add an event, one of my options, if you go down through at the bottom, there's a 'Default visibility' so if I click that, there's a little dropdown, where I can make a default visibility public or private. When I select 'private' here, that means that only myself and people who are invited to that particular meeting, somebody who I've actually added here as a guest, will be able to access the details of that meeting. Anybody else who has access to your calendar will just see that individual event as free or busy. So again, you still can make individual events more private. 

We've talked about setting your location, setting your hours, and then we've talked about how you can go down to your calendar here or any calendar and change the settings to make it visible - or how visible or invisible you want to display your calendars. The reason that's handy is that you can then search for a meeting time that suits attendees.  
This is the EAG training calendar and this week I want to set up a meeting with Laura, with myself, and also with my colleague Marco. So here in the the left menu of the Google calendar, and you can see there is a selector of the entire calendar month of June, and then 'Meet with' underneath. I've added in my name and Marco's name and anybody at UCD there, as you start typing their name, will appear. Then you can see here, alongside my own calendar you can see Laura Toby's calendar in purple and Marco's in green.  You can see then it just makes it easy to schedule - if people keep their calendars up to date, you can see when they're available. You can also see their location: for example if I want to set up a coffee meeting, and is there a day that the three of us are in the office, you can see our location. As I said about the privacy settings, you can see here in the purple that Laura has chosen just to share whether or not she's free or busy, whereas Marco is sharing all of the event details with the EAG training account. Again, the level of detail you want to share is up to yourself,  but we do recommend that you make your general availability open, and you know available to to your colleagues at UCD, just to facilitate sharing, and it just avoids that back and forth of any mail chain between a few people to see when you're available. For example here straight away, I can see that this afternoon we are free, but it might be a bit short notice. Straight away, I can see tomorrow that Laura is is out of office. 

That leads me actually to see another setting here, that you can actually set as well as the office location. If you go to Create, you can set an out of office and we do recommend setting this, if you're going to be absent, if you're on holidays or on leave for some reason. You can also use this if you're going to be somewhere specific, and I'll add the title to whatever it is e.g. conference for example and you can choose the the days here. So you can choose whether it repeats or not, and there's two handy things here: you can choose whether or not it will automatically decline meetings during this time that you've marked yourself as out of office, in other words unavailable, and whether it's only new meeting invitations, or whether you want stuff that's already in your calendar and new meetings to be declined. The nice feature here is that you can set a custom message, you can 'because I'm out of office'. So that could be a handy feature and again it allows people, if they schedule you for something, they'll automatically get a decline note from you, with the reason with your individual message. 

So again, a nice handy feature, and then to show how that works in practice: 
you can click on any place in Google Calendar to set up an event, so I will try and set up an event here with myself and Marco. I will click on Google Calendar here and it's very handy that automatically once you click it,  it opens up an hour-long slot and automatically it's added in those people - so Laura and Marco that I said I was going to meet with - and then this shows you as I said that when you set your office hours you can show here already, before somebody schedules me, well it's outside their working hours and it's outside Laura's working hours. How about if we try for tomorrow so the 14th of June, so again you can see that if I select 4.30 to 5.30 on a Friday evening, it's outside my working hours and Marco's working hours. You can see here that I'm marked as 'out of office' - so again it just makes life easier if you're scheduling meetings especially with with a few people. Ok I'm not going to complete that because I'm not going to schedule us for a meeting at 5.30 on a Friday evening! 

Another nice feature with Google Aalendar again that makes it easy to manage meetings, is if somebody invites you to a meeting - here this is a sample meeting that I set up earlier and invited EAG training to - so this appears as white in the middle until I choose to accept the meeting. So if I click on it, I see I have options to respond: Yes, No or Maybe. Calendar has automatically set it actually to join in virtually because my working location is Home, but you'll see under the Yes, there are two options. You can say 'yes in the meeting room' or 'yes joining virtually' and this is helpful, particularly for hybrid meetings I would say, if you as an organiser have a meeting room booked, you can see straight away if your attendees are joining virtually or if they're joining from the room. So again it just lets you plan for how many - what size room you need. 

So some good features with Google Calendar and you can pop in any of your colleagues over here, and you can see their availability straight away. And of course, it's not only for this week - you can change the frequency to the week, the month, and you can use the arrows here to look at at next week as well. 

Again when I clicked on the calendar, it showed me the availability for all of us and it's even better than that: if I decide I want to invite my colleague Richard also to this meeting. Again, Richard's availability shows up on Calendar and if I want to, Google Calendar will suggest a time that could be good for us as well.  So it depends on how flexible you want to make it.  I will exit this one because I don't actually want to set up the meeting today, but this just makes scheduling a lot easier. 

The next feature I want to show us is about setting up a team calendar. Having a team calendar can be really handy, whether that's for a calendar where everybody would, for example, indicate the days they were going to be on-site, if you were working in a hybrid team, or you could set up a team calendar for managing leave so that everybody's leave would be visible in calendar. It depends on what you want. We have for example here a sample 'on site calendar' for the Digital Office, and you don't have just have one calendar for your team - you can have different ones, depending on what's needed.

So to create a new calendar, it's very easy. Again on the the left menu here, you can see my calendars are indicated here on the left and then underneath you have Other Calendars. Select 'create new calendar' - anybody at UCD can do this. I'll say this is a 'webinar calendar' ,  my description is 'test for webinar' but you could have 'team calendar, team X calendar'. 

I will create my calendar so 'calendar creation is in progress', my internet must be a little bit slow today, and with that you can see that the new calendar is is created here. And we're going into the settings of it.  It's created here automatically on the left so I'll select 'Webinar Calendar; and this brings me to that calendar settings. So, this is a team calendar, and again the permissions and the sharing are the same for your individual calendar or team calendars.  I would be mindful of making it available to the public because that means it's available to anybody who has a Google account, but I would recommend to make available for University College Dublin. Maybe with this one, I only want people to see it's free or busy, but here I might want to add: I'll add myself to this calendar, and with this one I want to be able to not just to see all event details, this is our team calendar, so I want to be able to make changes to events. So I'll send that, and then I'm now subscribed to this team calendar.  

I'll go back and show you how it works then when I go to create an event: you can add the title here and you can choose obviously as well as an event there are options for focus time, you can set your out-of-office or working location here as well, and but if you go down here the blue it shows that it's this is the EAG training calendar. Whereas if I click on that again, there's a drop-down icon so I can see straight away where I might want to add that - so say for example here, I might want to add it to the Digital Office leave calendar.  The webinar calendar that I've just created as a test is down there, so I want to note that Laura is on leave tomorrow so I've added a title let's say and  I actually want to make it an all-day event on the Digital Office calendar.  I won't change anything else, I'll click save and then anybody who is subscribed to that Digital Office on-site calendar should see  - oh yeah sorry I said it for Monday - if I'm subscribed to that calendar, I can see Laura on the top. So it's a very handy feature and we do recommend that you create one for your team, just to keep track, and again to reduce some of the admin work. 

That was a whistle-stop tour of Google Calendar and the slides are below with links to screenshots and to the article links that go through all of this. 

 I now wanted to talk about a couple of additional helpful features that might be helpful for your work in Google Calendar. 
The first feature we'll talk about is appointment schedules.
You can set up slots on the calendar and there is a booking page that you can then share via email or embed on a website, so this is very useful for things like office hours or drop-in clinics, if you need to facilitate individual appointments, and so we'll look at that and the last feature then is proposing one-on-one meeting times directly from Gmail. We talked about looking at people's calendars to see their availability, but where you don't have access to someone else's calendar, e.g. they're outside of UCD, it's a partner or students and you can go and suggest meeting times directly from Gmail. So we'll go and look at those two last items now.

I'll go back to my calendar here: this is my EAG calendar, and again I'll go up to my Create button on the top left. Here, one of the options is 'appointment schedule' so I'll click appointment schedule here and I'll do this to say it's 'test schedule or test office hours' I'll say drop-in clinic. And se,e there are various options here: you can select the appointment duration you know from 15 minutes to two hours and you can also customise it. I'll say 30 minutes for my appointments, and you can choose whether this is a one-off or whether it's a repeating set of office hours. Again, it really depends on the context, so in this case I'll say it doesn't repeat and so I want to set some office hours for tomorrow. Maybe I'll set them for next week, for Monday from 10 to 12 and then I can select another time on Monday just by selecting the + icon. So I can say from 2 to 3.30 as well on Monday, and if I want I can add another date as well. So you can see it's very flexible. I might say on Wednesday as well, I'm available from 9 to 10 for office hours. 

so the next option here is my scheduling window, so you decide how long in advance an appointment can be booked and the minimum time before they can be booked. So I'll say two hours, and something that I think is a nice feature as well, especially if you're doing a lot of office hours, is that if you want you can add a little bit of buffer time. So if you need time to prepare, for example for a student or something, you can set yourself maybe 15 minutes between appointments just so they're not completely back-to-back. You can also set a maximum number of bookings per day, which again is is helpful, the calendars that it's on and so you need to check if you want as I said if you wanted a team calendar. For example, if somebody had delegated their calendar to you or if you were booking office hours for somebody, I could also put on - I'll put on the webinar calendar here, there's nothing on it - but you can say bookable times won't be available during any events created or accepted on these calendars. So again, it allows you to customise the office hours and make sure that you're not scheduling bookable stats when somebody has actually isn't available. Then you can add co-hosts as well to co-host the appointment, so I want to add myself here, that the two of us can manage this appointment schedule. So again, you can always create a test one of these appointment slots and then you can go back and edit it, is the good news. So you can go back and edit any of these settings - I'll click Next here. 

The next thing to remember is whichever calendar you create the booking appointments on, those details will be displayed on the booking page. You can select how and where to meet as well and so at the moment,  you can select Google Meet, in person, a phone call or none/to be specified later. You see that Zoom isn't currently available here, so  if it's an in-person meeting you can specify the meeting room or if you want to set a Zoom meeting you could set 'none/to be specified later' and then you can you can add Zoom details to the event later. You can add a description e.g. the drop in clinic 'please bring details of your inquiry'. You can select various different things, so they suggest the first name, surname and email address, which are the required fields that somebody needs to give to book an appointment, but you can also add an item - so you can ask them to add their phone number, or you could add a custom item, for example, somebody's student number if you wanted. You can decide whether this is required or not here, and then something's very nice is that both yourself or whoever is creating the appointment schedules, and the person who's booking the appointment, once the status is booked, you'll both get an invitation on Google Calendar with this description, details and it'll automatically set a reminder as well. So here the default is to be one day before, you might want to get a reminder an hour before, or then you can add a couple of reminders if you want. So it's always helpful.

So I'll click 'save' here and then you'll see it's as easy as that: so my appointment schedule now for next week is created. I have slots I've set from 10 to 12 and from 2 to 3.30 on Monday, and I think Wednesday was my other slot, so you have options here already to share the schedule: whether you want to share the booking page by a link, or a website embed, and you can select whether you want to share the whole schedule, select the whole set of these, or you can send them a single booking page for an individual appointment slot you've set up. And you'll see here, I actually have a number of appointment schedules set up and various test things: I'll click 'done' here because I'm not ready to share it just yet. What I want to do is open my booking page to look at it. So you can see the details of the account that set it up, and you can see that it says it's 30-minute appointments and then you can add a description or some information here. And then it's as easy as sharing this link, or embedding it on your website and whoever clicks this slot, then you know put in their first name, their surname, their email address and you see the field here that we set as an option to put their student number, once you click 'book', both they and you get a calendar invitation, and you can add your Soom details to that if you want. 

So I'll cancel out here - as somebody books a slot, then it will show us unavailable for anybody else who comes in and looks at the schedule, so it's updated instantly. You can see here, you can select an appointment time from the calendar here,so it shows you what dates are available or not. So that's I guess especially handy if you're setting up recurring appointment slots. Again, very easy to use and yet to recommend that you use that feature. 

Just to note that if you were using this in the past there was a feature called appointment slots, that was available in the settings that will be switched off in July 2024 and from then you will be using appointment schedules. They are more powerful anyway! 

So that brings us to I think eight settings we've looked at in Google Calendar. The very last one is in Gmail actually, but it is something that we do get asked about in IT services. it's about meeting with somebody from another institution, but I don't have access to check their calendar. So what you can do is: go into your Gmail, click Compose to have a new email, and down at the bottom you'll see there's a little calendar icon. Choose 'set up a time to meet' so you can either create an event directly from your email, or what's very useful is to offer times that you're free, which is the first option. This will bring up the calendar here on the right-hand side of your email and you're prompted to find times you can meet. So whether the increments are one hour, forty-five minutes, thirty minutes and so on.  Today is a little bit short notice, so I'm going to go to tomorrow or Monday, say from 9 to 12 again, the same as the appointment slots. You can add another slot that day, I'll say from 2 to 3, and I can add a date again, so I might say the 18th from 9 to 10, okay? 

So then I've selected these dates, I'm going to click 'next' . The event title is 'sample project X' and it's 30 minutes - if I want I can change that to any duration. My availability is on Monday 17th of June between 9 and 12 or 2 to 3, and then on the 18th of June either between 9 and 10. Again, there's a drop-down here if you want to add other information like a description or whether it's an in-person or a phone, or you want to specify the Zoom details later. And then, the last step here is 'add to email' and then this is what you will see in your email. 

So you will see proposed times that you want to meet - again here you can add your subject suggested and say hi and then when you send this email, the person will be presented with these nicely formatted slots that they can choose. Once again, once they click a slot it will set up a calendar event for both you and the person you've sent the email to, it will send an invitation to you both, and it will appear on both of your calendars. So it's very handy. At the moment, this is available just for one other person and maybe in time Google will add the functionality for multiple people,  but in the meantime, it just looks well, and it's very easy to do, and yeah it just makes it very easy to suggest times. Again, it's just avoiding that email back and forth and making life a bit easier. How you do that again is you click Compose, and you go down to the bottom toolbar, and the last icon here is to offer times that you're free or create a calendar event. 

So with that, I'm going to go back to our slide and the very last thing to talk about is further resources and support. So the slide deck itself, and the links to all of the features that I've talked about here, are available below the video. I'll also refer you again to the Digital Office website, which has lots of information and guidance about collaborating and just more efficiently using the digital tools available at UCD. There are help articles and you can also submit a help ticket if you need any more help at the IT support hub ucd.ie/IT help. Again, you're all very welcome, you're cordially invited to join the Google Workspace Community on Google Chat and then further afield,  Google calendar has a very comprehensive help center that's available online. 

Also, if you're maybe not familiar with Google Calendar there's a LinkedIn Learning course - all UCD staff have access to LinkedIn Learning - it's an introduction to Google Calendar and it goes through the features to get you started if you've come from another system. 

So that concludes our webinar for today, thank you for watching and we hope these tips are useful.