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It probably never occurred to you. But a shared calendar can increase productivity and communication both at home and at work. Why? Sharing your calendar with coworkers, family, and clients will also help you stay organized. An added benefit is that they enable greater productivity and prevent many minor errors from occurring.
Shared calendars, if used properly, can produce remarkable results. However, you need to understand your calendar better. For that reason, here are some benefits and tips for optimizing your shared calendar.
What is a shared calendar?
Your calendar becomes a shared calendar when you share it with someone or a group, such as coworkers, family, or friends. Depending on your purpose, you can create several calendars and share them with different people.
For example, you can create a team calendar for your co-workers so you can track their tasks. You can also share a personal calendar with your family to keep up to date with events such as birthday parties, family gatherings, or school events. In addition, you can allow them to edit/modify events and appointments in the shared calendar.
Why do you need to share your calendar?
People share their calendars for a variety of reasons. These include keeping track of their children’s extracurricular activities and upcoming doctor’s appointments, or tracking the progress of a team project.
As hybrid work models have become more popular, more and more people are working virtually. In fact, as of 2022, 26% of US workers are working remotely. As a result, it becomes more and more important to keep in touch with each other. At the same time, due to the fact that most of us work in different locations, it becomes increasingly difficult to schedule meetings and keep track of everyone’s schedule.
Benefits of using a shared calendar
Shared calendars can be accessed from any device, anywhere.
Whether you have a laptop or not doesn’t matter. You can check your appointments, add or remove tasks, and manage your team through an online calendar by logging in from another laptop or tablet. And with tons of calendar apps available, you can access your calendar right from your smartphone.
As a result, there will be less stuff to carry to meetings or between home and work. What’s more, each meeting participant can set up the next meeting and synchronize them with their phones.
You can customize your shared calendar.
“No matter what calendar tool you use, they offer a level of customization,” writes Angela Ruth in a previous Calendar article. “This allows you to change it to suit your specific needs.” For example, with Google Calendar, you can change the view from week, month or agenda.
It is also possible to change the colors, title and items to be displayed. If you have several companies or clients, or manage several projects, this can help you stay organized.
You can also create custom calendar links using other tools like Teamup. You can use it to securely access permissions. In addition, you can give each calendar a unique name to make it easier to identify.
“One of the most important things about Calendar invitations is themes,” adds Angela. “Make more effort to have a final theme.”
You can share calendars with your team.
Managing workloads, tasks, deadlines, and milestones is easy and fast with a shared team calendar. Your team members can be added or removed, tasks can be assigned, and unassigned tasks can be managed.
What’s more, you can vary the level of access rights for each user based on their competence. As a result, some team members can simply open the calendar and assigned tasks to see specific information, while others can edit and add tasks.
In addition to viewing their own schedules, your employees can also view their colleagues’ schedules. In addition, you can receive notifications whenever a task is assigned or edited.
It ensures that your tasks are balanced.
The best thing about sharing calendars? They balance your tasks with those of team members. In addition, you can view your employees’ calendars and better understand their availability and responsibilities. This way you can schedule meetings and tasks more efficiently.
Additionally, you can view their calendars to find out what clients they’ve met and what tasks have been completed. Thanks to this, you will be able to better plan your projects.
You can have short-term and long-term vision.
When planning a calendar, it is common to plan one month at a time. While this is true, there are times when a detailed look at the day or week is necessary. In other cases, reduction is required.
Most calendars offer multiple views, such as daily schedules, weekly schedules, monthly schedules, and quarterly schedules. Using these views, you can see the daily workload of each team member, as well as have an overview of the entire project.
You will never experience FOMO.
Have you ever felt bad after forgetting a family dinner or a friend’s birthday party? Even worse, did it cause a severe case of FOMO?
With a shared calendar, you prevent this from happening as you will receive reminders. In addition, notifications will appear when you need them, even if you forget about them.
In addition to scheduling appointments, you can also receive RSVPs. If you invite multiple people to a meeting via the online calendar app, you can request a response.
Set recurring appointments or appointments.
“When meetings are repeated, it becomes a mess,” writes Max Palmer in a previous Calendar article. “With the calendar software, you can easily set a recurring appointment.”
Going forward, the team will no longer discuss last-minute monthly updates. When the appointment repeats itself, the remaining days, weeks or months will be filled in automatically. As an added bonus, this prevents calendar conflicts such as double bookings.
Fewer schedule changes.
Planning and rescheduling meetings is not only inefficient, but also very annoying. After all, corporate employees spend an average of four hours a week preparing for and attending meetings. What’s more, 71% of professionals waste time every week due to unproductive and canceled meetings.
When calendars are shared, the ability to reschedule appointments is reduced, saving time and money.
Easily integrates with other online project and calendar management tools.
The ability to integrate cloud project management tools and calendars that can be shared online is a very important feature as many people use different tools. For example, Calendar can be linked to many other calendars, including Google Calendar and Microsoft Calendar. It also integrates with tools like Hubspot, Square, Zapier, and Zoom.
No surprises.
All your team members will share the same calendar, so there will be no surprises when all your schedules are in one place. When everyone has the same calendar, it will also be easier to identify conflicts in advance and plan accordingly.
For example, a long vacation or other priorities are very stressful when you’re working on a project with everyone and suddenly one of them decides it’s the perfect time to take a break. To ensure that projects are delivered on time, you must have a clear foresight.
Intelligence.
By using online calendars, you can organize and manage team members and schedule tasks faster and easier. They also help increase productivity by automatically timing/distance between locations, estimating how long it will take a team to complete a task, and so on.
What are the different ways to share a calendar?
There are many ways and scenarios to share your calendar. When creating a calendar and adding events to it, you can make it public and grant different permissions to different users. In addition to viewing free and busy schedules, they can view already added events and edit them.
URL sharing
iCal and HTML formats are available for each calendar assigned a unique URL. Whenever you want to share your calendar, you can send your iCal URL to your friends, co-workers or groups in your organization so they can import it and add it to their calendar.
Sharing public URLs
You can share your calendar with a wider group by using a public calendar. The View Free/Busy information only or View event details option allows you to restrict other people from seeing information in your calendar. The public calendar cannot be edited or changed by others.
Sharing private URLs
You may not want your calendar to be public all the time because everyone will be able to view it. By sharing a private URL, you can limit the number of people who can access your calendar.
Sharing with specific people
Alternatively, you can send an invitation to your co-workers or any group to share your calendar. They will be able to access your calendar as soon as they accept the invitation and subscribe to it. This is especially useful when you need to share your calendar with an assistant so she can manage your daily activities.
Embed a calendar
In order for people to make appointments with you, you may need to embed a calendar on your site. In the calendar details you will find the HTML code to embed the calendar. You can embed the embed code in your site’s HTML and the calendar will appear on your wikis, blogs, email signatures, and web pages.
Image credit: Photo: Andrea Piacquadio; pexel; Thank you!
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