As a music teacher, staying organized is essential for managing your busy schedule. Google Calendar is a powerful tool that can help you keep track of your lessons, rehearsals, performances, and personal events. To make the most of this versatile application, here are five quick tips to enhance your Google Calendar experience on your desktop computer.
1. Shortcuts for Effortless Navigation
Google Calendar offers a range of shortcuts that can save you time and streamline your daily planning:
- Views: You can quickly switch between different calendar views using keyboard shortcuts.
- Day View: Press ‘D’
- Week View: Press ‘W’
- Month View: Press ‘M’
- Today’s View: Press ‘T’
- Go to any date: Press ‘G’ and enter the desired date.
- View Specific Groups of Dates: Use the mini-calendar on the left to click and drag to create a detailed view of specific dates.
These shortcuts will help you move seamlessly through your calendar, making it easy to check your schedule at a glance.
2. Multiple Calendars for Better Organization
One of the great features of Google Calendar is the ability to create multiple calendars to suit different aspects of your life. Consider setting up the following calendars:
- Work/School Calendar: Use this calendar for school events, professional tasks, reminders, and professional development events.
- Personal/Home Calendar: Organize personal appointments, family outings, and other personal reminders. You can also use this calendar for meal planning, setting up recurring cycles for family-favorite meals.
- Additional Calendars:
- A ‘Bills’ calendar to keep track of payment due dates. You can add details about the amount due, making it a helpful tool for managing your finances.
- Meal planning: If you find you have the same meals on rotation in your family, try scheduling them as recurring cycles. If you’re too busy to meal plan, you can already have an idea of what things to eat and when, and know they will be enjoyed by your family. This also helps when shopping at the store or compiling an online list.
Here are a few additional quick tips with it comes to organizing multiple calendars:
- Color-Coding: Experiment with different colors for each calendar, making it easier to distinguish between work, home, bills, and meals.
- Default Calendar: Set a default calendar, so new events are automatically added to the calendar that you use most frequently.
- Toggle Calendars On and Off: You can easily hide or show calendars in your side panel, helping you focus on the calendars that are relevant at any given time.
- Public Calendars: If you want to share events with others, such as students or colleagues, create a public calendar. Others can add it to their calendars, and changes will be automatically reflected in their schedules.
- Read more about sharing your calendar here.
- Read more about subscribing to another person’s calendar here.
By using multiple calendars, you can keep your professional and personal life separate and well-organized. It also becomes easy to see everything from your phone or on-the-go at a quick glance.
3. Quick Event Creation to Save Time and Clicks
Google Calendar offers several shortcuts to expedite event creation:
- Day View: Click on a day and enter day-view. Click and hold your mouse through the time you want for your event, then release the mouse to create an event. You can further edit event details.
- Week View: In week-view, click and drag over multiple days to create a quick multi-day event.
- Month View: Click and drag over multiple days to create a quick multi-day event.
Additional settings to explore:
- Default Time-Lengths: Set default time lengths for events to save time when scheduling. Most of your events will be automatically populated with the default duration.
- Duplicate Events: Use the duplicate feature to copy events to future dates. For recurring events, add recurring event details to make duplication even faster
- Event Details: Add important information to the event details, including text, agendas, and attached files. This is helpful for storing lists, agendas, and additional details related to an event.
4. Scheduling Appointments with Others
Coordinating appointments with students, parents, or colleagues can be challenging. Google Calendar provides a solution with the ‘Appointment Schedule’ feature:
- Click on the ‘Create’ menu and select ‘Appointment Schedule.’
This feature allows you to create a sharable calendar with pre-set availability and time slots for others to book. Once someone books a slot, it becomes unavailable to others. This is a valuable tool for scheduling lessons, conferences, tutoring sessions, auditions, or playing tests. You can read more about creating appointment schedules here.
5. Printing Your Google Calendar
While digital calendars are incredibly convenient, there are times when a hard copy comes in handy. Here are a few steps to printing a wonderfully useful calendar for those times when digital just doesn’t work.
- Step 1: Select Calendars
- Ensure that the calendars you want to print are displayed on the screen.
- Step 2: Open Print Panel
- Under settings, select ‘Print’ (or press Cmd + P or Ctrl + P) to access the print menu.
- Step 3: Adjust Settings
- Here, you can adjust the date range, text size, and other settings to tailor the printout to your needs.
- *Helpful tip: Adjust the text size smaller if your event names are long.
Printing your calendar can serve multiple purposes. You can create a “fridge-view” calendar for your family, share important dates with students and parents for fundraisers and performances, or even print a blank calendar to jot down notes and events on your desk. You can later transfer these entries to your digital calendar when you have more time. Read more about printing your calendar here.
Final Thoughts
Google Calendar is a wonderfully versatile tool that can revolutionize how music teachers manage their time and busy schedules. With time-saving shortcuts, multiple calendars for better organization, quick event creation, scheduling with others, and the ability to print your calendar when needed, you may find it much easier to balance the demands on your time better than ever before!
What’s your favorite Google Calendar tip? Leave a comment below!
If you liked this, you might also enjoy reading…
- How to Organize Google Classroom & Google Drive: Roundup
- 8 easy ideas for creating better music room resources in Google Slides
- 2 ingenious Google Chrome time-savers: QR Code Maker & pinned tabs
Want more resources for music tech teachers?
Hello! I’m Katie Argyle – an Australian music technology trainer and consultant with a passion for helping music teachers through my business Midnight Music.
I’m a qualified teacher but no, I don’t currently teach in a school. I help teachers through my online professional development space – the Midnight Music Community – where there are tutorial videos, courses, links and downloadable resources.
I like to focus on easy ways to incorporate technology into what you are already doing in your music curriculum through a range of creative projects. I also run live workshops and have presented at countless conferences and other music education events.
If you want simple, effective ideas for using technology in music education, I would LOVE to help you inside the Midnight Music Community.
One Comment
Some new information and some confirmation of features I already knew – great thanks!
Is there an equivalent blog post for Outlook Calendar as our school is totally Microsoft? I don’t use it as much as I would like because I feel it takes too long.