3 simple Google Calendar settings that help distributed teamwork
I’m working in an internationally distributed team and recently experienced how does it feel to move from one time zone to another, still having a lot of work in both of them.
My brain gets sooooo messed up with setting the meetings, so I decided to highlight 3 main Google Calendar features that helped me survive.
So my top list is:
- World clock
- Secondary time zone
- Default guest permissions
World clock
I used TimeAndDate converter before and it’s fine. It’s just so convenient to have it right here on the same Calendar page. Don’t know why I haven’t figured it out earlier. Together with my second favorite feature, it works just perfectly.
To set it up, just go to Settings:
Secondary time zone
This setting just saves my life because of the time difference between Los Angeles and Perm is 13 hours. It gets easier after daylight saving when it moves to 12 hours, but 13 is not simply an unlucky number, it’s just killing me with its inconvenience. Especially when I need to schedule a meeting for LA evening, it’s already next morning in Perm. Meeting people from the future!
Going to Calendar settings and just ticking the right box saved tons of time and energy for me. Now I can see them next to each other.
The beautiful part is that while I travel back and forth, I can switch the primary time zone just in one click.
Default guest permissions
It may vary from team to team, but here at RealtimeBoard we try to build a fast-paced environment and trust each other. So for most of the meetings, it’s more convenient to have default permission for guests to be able to modify the meetings.
Why is that important? Having timezone overlap just for 2–4 working hours, every small change in a meeting agreement just creates more unnecessary Slack conversations and sometimes a lot of pain.
“Could we move our meeting for 30min later? I checked your calendar is free” or
“Let’s meet on Zoom instead of Hangouts?”
10 hours later: “Yes, sure, could you give me a link?”= I could just modify this event with the new link right on the Calendar and send email notification after that!
One more bonus feature: working hours
I am still in process of figuring out how to use it in the best way. It helps definitely, but not all the teams have fixed working hours. And definitely, none of us works 8 hours (we work more).
So the way I started to use this setting now is to indicate my ‘non-sleeping hours’. It doesn’t mean I am in the office from 7 am to 10 pm, but this time I am usually online and up for a meeting if my distributed team needs me. It helps to set up meetings too because everyone would get a pop-up notification if they confuse the time zone and try to schedule a meeting with me for 5 am.
These four things seem to be so stupid-simple, yet it took me a while to find them, set them in the right way and feel the value. I wish someone would tell me “this is the way we do things here” on my 1st working day. So now all the new members of my team can have a better experience.
What other life hacks you use?
