because I've been getting a lot of questions

about how I use my calendar personally

and Google calendar has been my weapon-of-choice

for the past five, six, seven years almost to this point.

So, today in this video, we're gonna go through

how I use Google Calendar, some of the tips and tricks I use

both on desktop and mobile, how I used it as a student

versus now as an incredibly professional businessman,

and hey, if you guys use a different calendar,

most of the stuff is going to apply, not all of it,

but for the vast majority of it, it's gonna apply to

any calendar you use, so iCal, Outlook Calendar,

I don't know, like a stone tablet on the ground,

that one's gonna be a bit of a stretch, but this will apply

to almost any system for the most part.

The first thing I need to stress here is that

Google Calendar is part of what I call

my quick capture system.

Now, I'm gonna talk about this concept a little bit more

in a future video, but essentially, the gist of it

is that quick capture means you want to get ideas

of any kind out of your head as immediately as possible

and into a system that you trust, one that has context,

one that's organized, and one that will either notify you

when you need to know about it again in the future

or that you trust yourself to check regularly.

So, with that being said, we're gonna get into

how I specifically use Google Calendar in my daily life

and I need to split this explanation in two

because the way I use it today is very different

than how I used it as a student.

As a student, I had my calendar split into multiple

different calendars because the concept essentially for me

was to split my life into different components

and then be able to look at each component individually.

So, I had specific calendars for classes, for work,

for on-campus events, I also had one for other stuff,

just kind of things that didn't fit, and I also had

a professor office hours calendar.

By the way guys, if I sound like a frog right now,

it's because I'm sick, sorry.

One last thing about how I used my calendar as a student

is that at the beginning of every semester,

I would put in all the important dates right away

so like the date when I needed to sign up for classes

for the next semester, that would go in right away,

finals week would go in there, and that way,

I knew it was all set up at the beginning of the semester.

I wouldn't have to be worrying about when do I sign

up for classes, when do I start studying for finals,

it's all set up initially and then I can just react to it

as it comes up on a week-to-week basis.

So, that brings us to today where I use my calendar

in a very different manner and that's because I'm no longer

a student and my time isn't dominated mostly by events.

I'm a business owner and most of my time

is kind of free form, I can choose to work on whatever

I want to work on at any time as long as it gets done.

I would say probably about 90% of my time is like that.

The other 10% is scheduled meetings for the most part

because as a podcaster, I'm often interviewing people

or I'm being on other people's shows.

The other main use is for travel since I'm going to

schools to speak sometimes, or I go to conferences

that are in different cities and different states,

I'm often traveling and when I travel,

I create all day events in the calendar so they're not

blocking up the hourly slots and that way I just know oh,

I'm in Denver these days, I'm in New York City these days.

The last main thing I use my calendar for these days

is for exercise because a lot of my exercise is actually

event-driven like my yoga class is 6:30pm on Thursdays,

so I gotta be there on time and for ice skating practice,

it's only a very limited window of time every day

that I can do it, so I just schedule it on the calendar

and then because I'm a completionist,

I put my gym time on there as well.

So, with those explanations out of the way,

I've got a few more things to talk about,

first of which is mobile.

Now, I used to use Sunrise Calendar on my iPhone

to manage Google Calendar because it was free

and it was beautiful and at the time,

the Google Calendar app kind of stunk in my opinion.

That is not the case anymore, I think the

Google Calendar app is pretty good, however,

I don't use it because now I use an app called Fantastical.

The reasons I use Fantastical is number one, it is the best

calendar app that I have found for use on the Apple Watch

right now because it's the one that has glances,

so I can just easily look at the watch, swipe up and see

what my next event is, and it also has absolutely

fantastic natural language processing which means

if I use voice dictation to create an event which is a

really seamless, frictionless way to get it out of my brain

and into my phone, then it will intelligently pick out

the parts of the event that need

to be put in different fields.

And that brings me to the last thing we need to talk about

in this video which is scheduling stuff because

email tag is the worst, trust me, I've got like

50 message-long threads from a few years ago

where I'm trying to be like yeah, I'm available this day,

oh you're not available that day, blah, blah, blah.

You can use technology to make this much, much simpler.

Now, the app that I use on a regular basis is called

Calendly and this is an app that lets you define

certain dates and times on your weekly schedule

when people can basically pencil in their

own appointments with you and this is really, really useful

for people like me who are podcasters and have to

schedule interviews a lot, or maybe people like tutors,

anyone who has to open up big amounts of their schedule

in limited windows to let people basically pencil in

their own appointments, but I don't think it's super

useful for students because you guys usually have a lot

of your schedule already spoken for by classes

and you're generally just trying to schedule things like

group project work time.

Now, Google Calendar has their own find-a-time feature,

but what I found is most students don't have their

calendar game on lock, so you're gonna be like

the only person who has everything really nicely scheduled

and everyone is gonna be like yeah, I don't know

what I'm doing next Tuesday.

So, Doodle is what I recommend for you guys

because Doodle basically lets you define a date range

and then everyone can vote on the times that work for them

and you can easily see the column

where everyone's available.

So, that about does it for this video.

Now, if you've been paying attention, you are now a

scheduling ninja though, do not put that in your Twitter bio

or I will find you, and if you guys have extra tips about

how to use your calendar that I didn't cover here,

I would love to hear them otherwise,

thank you so much for watching.

If you enjoyed this video and you found it useful,

give it a like to support this channel

and if you want to get new tips on being a more

effective student every single week, you can click

that big red subscribe button right down there.

Also, I wrote a free book on how to earn better grades,

so if you want to get a copy of that, you can click the book

and I'll send one to you.

And in last week's video, we talked about skipping classes

and whether or not it's worth it, so check it out

if you missed it, also if you want to get the full article

for this video along with links to all the resources

we talked about, click the orange button right there.

And lastly, if you want to connect,

I'm TomFrankly on Instagram and Twitter

or you can leave a comment down below.

Thanks for watching.