Productivity Series: Uses For Calendar

Take a look at how I use the Calendar app. I primarily only use two calendars for everything. I also subscribe to some useful calendars. I'll show you some other Calendar tips as well.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at how I use the Calendar App on my Mac.
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So here's another video in my Productivity Series where I show you how I use various parts of macOS to be more productive. So today let's look at the Calendar App. Now I probably don't use the Calendar App as much as many of your do. I don't really have that many scheduled events. But I do have some unique ways of using it and maybe you can use these ideas as well. 
So first of all I only have two main calendars. That's Personal and Family. Why don't I have one for Work and Personal or maybe several different aspects of work? The way I look at it is there is only one of me. If I have a lunch scheduled does it really matter if it's a personal friendly lunch or a business lunch. There's only one of me and I can only be at one lunch at a time. So I put anything that pertains to just me in my personal calendar. It's personal and work is what I can really call it. But probably my most important calendar is the Family calendar. So the Family Calendar is a Shared calendar that I setup with the members of my household. We put shared events in there. Anything that could effect anybody else. So, for instance, I will put something like a dentist appointment in the Family Calendar so everybody else knows that I've got to do something that morning. I have to go to the dentist. For me it really doesn't matter whether it's in Personal or Family. I always have those turned on so I could always see those. So we all put events in there and it's really great because instead of having to tell everybody else all the little things that we do, we just put it in the calendar. You get an alert when somebody adds something to the calendar. You can also look at a day when you're trying to schedule something and see what other people are up to. 
Plus the Notes and information is really useful as well. If we're taking a trip somewhere I could put all the flight information in the calendar event. So instead of somebody asking me, you know, when's our flight, what airline are we flying, that kind of thing, it's always there in the calendar. They can just go and look at it. 
Now sometimes I have to put things in both calendars. That's okay. I'd love to have a better way to do it but here's an example of a speaking engagement that I have. Of course it's on my Personal calendar. This is very important to me. But I also duplicated it and added it to the Family calendar because everybody else has to know that I have this time blocked off and I can't be disturbed then. They can't schedule anything else for that time. For the Family calendar I just have the event and time. For the Personal calendar I would perhaps have more things say in Notes like zoom information and links and what topic I'm discussing. All sorts of things like that. 
I do like to make use of the Notes and URL's and locations when I can. So I'll put a URL if there is a link to something. Like it's an all night meeting. I would put all sorts of other information in the Notes so I don't have emails or text files or other things laying around that I need to find as the event approaches. It's all just there in the Calendar. It also makes it really easy to access that information on my iPhone if I'm somewhere else and I want to think about what I'm doing tomorrow I can look at my notes for an event happening tomorrow. 
Also notice here how I'm using an emoji character in the title for this event. I've got the megaphone emoji that I use whenever I'm speaking to somebody. I'll use emoji from time to time to help make things standout. Otherwise it's just kind of a sea of text and colors on the calendar. 
Now I do schedule some special events. For instance, I've got on the 20th of every month a monthly payment event. This is when I want to check to make sure all the auto-payments for credit cards and mortgage and things like that are okay and going through. Originally years ago this would be the event that triggered an alert and I would go in and pay all my bills. Everything is autopay now so I just use it to kind of check to make sure everything is set for autopay. So this is just something that happens on the 20th of every month. It's set to repeat monthly so it will just repeat every month on the 20th. Also note that instead of just having a regular alert that I could easily miss this is a really important event, or at least it used to be before autopay, so I setup an email alert. So I've gone into the Alerts and instead of using one of these I set Custom and I set it to be an email sent to myself at the time of the event. Since I always clear out my Inbox I'm never going to miss an email about this event even though I might miss the Notification. So I recommend doing this for any event that's of the upmost importance and you just can't miss the alert. 
I also have a similar one for quarterly taxes. I need to pay quarterly taxes and fees. I've got an event right here that's even got an emoji for it. Since these are quarterly and I like to schedule them for, you know, late in the week before it's due, I basically make it at the beginning of every year I set them up for every quarter for that year. 
Now I also subscribe to a couple of calendars. So these are kind of simple but really useful. My local trash service in the city here, if you go to the site for the city, they actually have a calendar you can subscribe to. It's got different systems. You can do it with Goggle as well but I subscribe to the one that's compatible with Calendar and you can see I've got a trash service subscription so I can see when trash is going to be picked up. If it's going to be picked up on a different day in a certain week and also if there are some weeks that are special. Like, for instance, this one here is Extra Trash Day. It's kind of hard to find this information by looking on the website. So it's just nice to have this in the Calendar. It if gets in the way I can just turn it off if I'm not looking for that information right now. Likewise I'm also a baseball fan so I subscribe to a Calendar that shows me the Colorado Rockies schedule. I can see that here and I can see every game because it's kind of a pain to go onto a website and try to lookup when the game starts tonight. Make sure it's the right timezone and all of that. I just have this calendar I subscribe to and most of the time it's turned Off so it's not cluttering the calendar. But I simply turn it On and I can glance at it to see when the game starts and I can turn it off again. 
So think of other things where there might be calendars you can subscribe to and look for online subscriptions that you can add to your calendar app. So if you like share your productivity tips when using the calendar app in the Comments and let me know what calendars you subscribe to, maybe what different calendars you create, and the way that you use calendar that are a little different than how I use it.

Comments: 14 Responses to “Productivity Series: Uses For Calendar”

Justine murdy

3 years ago

For my work, I regularly need to create schedules for organized events. For this I create several appointments in my calendar which together span an entire day, a week or more.

Sometimes, the schedules themselves are ok, but I need to move up everything a bit due to changes in the planning. For instance, start everything half an hour later, move everything a day or a week.

Do I really need to reschedule every appointment one-by-one?

Gary Rosenzweig

Justine: You can usual drag events up and down in week or day view, but I think they have to be done one at a time.

Gary! Wow! That was fast. Thanks.

I actually found this solution. I was doubling back to share it.

"You can now select multiple events and use the keyboard shortcuts:
⌃⌥ [ ↑ | ↓ ] to move the events 15min sooner or later.
⌃⌥ [ ← | → ] to move the events 1 day (in day/week view) or 1 week (in month view) sooner or later."

Justine: Thanks for sharing that!

Howard Brazee

My personal calendars are on my wife's iCloud account. (My iCloud calendars are unchecked). (Me, her, & us calendars). I also have a Google calendar that has events for our senior apartments.

Peter Jenkins

Where do you find the custom alert in order to send an email instead of a normal alert for a calendar event?

Peter: I show you right around 4:20.

Eric

Slighty off-topic: having watched the video I was reviewing my own use of the Calendar app. In doing so I noticed that there was a duplicate entry for a friend's birthday. This led me to checking my Contacts and, lo and behold, that was where the duplication was. Once the duplicate contact was deleted then it also disappeared from Calendar. Result!

Ed Adams

So sorry your team was the Rockies… I like the simplicity of what you are doing with the personal and family calendars but couldn’t you just send invites to your family for events you need them to know?

Ed: That's a lot of extra steps. Plus most of these events are things we are all doing, just things we should know about. If I am having dinner with the friend one night, my wife just needs to know that.

Cath W

When we have people to dinner, in Notes of the event, we add what we served. It then provides a ready reference so the same meal isn’t repeated next time for those guests.

Vincent Cina

I often use the location field. It gives me one click access to the Maps app from the calendar with the route and I can see traffic conditions with estimated travel time. It automatically connects to my car's navigation system and when I get in the car it is mapped out on the big display (Tesla).

Doug V

When I have a scheduled doctor's visit, I add to notes items I want to ask about or clarify. After the visit, I update the notes with results and further info. So I have a permanent record of what when on and what I may want to refer to in future.
Also, when entering travel by air, I use the "floating" option when entering the times for scheduled take-off and arrival. I find that to be more helpful than using any specific time zone, or having to change the time zone when setting it up.

Justin Ross

Hey Gary! We actually setup individually shared calendars for everyone in the family, color coded, everyone has their own, and we have a FAMILY one so 5 in total. Everyone is responsible for adding their own events, work, personal etc along with as much data in the Notes, URL, attachment, Location etc so that we all know where everyone is or who needs to be where at any given time. Lots to going on, but never run in to double booking.

Comments Closed.

Productivity Series: Uses For Calendar

Comments: 14 Responses to “Productivity Series: Uses For Calendar”

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