This Is Your Life 2.0

Are you one of those people with too many things to do? You’ve tried using dayplanners and agendas, right? But then you forget to write stuff down, you lose it, you leave it at home all the time, you never look at it until it’s too late.

What you need is a portable calendar to organize your up coming events, one that you can access from ANY computer with an internet connection. Google Calendar is just the tool you need, and it’s here to get you organized. You can choose either to keep your calendar private or to share it with close friends/relatives/colleagues. You can also use Google Calendar to organize your organization’s schedules or promote your community events by publishing a calendar on your web site.

What exactly is ?

Google Calendar is a free, online, shareable calendar service provided by Google. With Google Calendar, organizing your schedule is simple. You can add events and invitations effortlessly, view your events through daily, weekly, monthly and agenda views, keep things to yourself or share with friends and family.

It’s easy for you to keep track of all your important events for school or your everyday life, e.g. birthdays, doctor’s appointments, seminars, your group meeting schedules etc. You can relax and – finally! – feel on top of things. And, you can view your schedule using any application or device that accepts iCal or XML files.

1. Go to google.ca. If you don’t have an account, sign up for one. If you don’t have a gmail account, click “ Sign in ” and then “ Create an account now ” to set up your new account. If you already have a Google or gmail account, sign in .
2. From the top left menu, choose “More” and “Calendar” from the drop-down menu.
3. Look at “My Calendars” in the left column menu. You should have only one right now.
4. Click “create” (under the calendar list on the right) and create a new calendar. You can have separate calendars for all aspects of your life – classes, classwork, your job, your activities…whatever makes sense to you. Let’s start with one for your classes – type “classes” into the calendar name field and click “create calendar”.
5. Click the arrow to the left of your new calendar name and choose a colour to represent this calendar in your display.
6. In the centre window, find the day of one of your courses. Click on the start time of the class and click once. In the pop-up window, type the name of the course into the “What” field, use the drop-down menu to change the calendar to “classes”, then click the “Create Event” button.
7. Is your class longer than 1 hour? Hover the cursor over  “=” sign at the bottom until the double-headed arrow appears and drag the window down to the class end time.
8. Click the title of the calendar event you just created (the class name).
9. On the edit screen, in the “repeats” drop-down menu, change it from “does not repeat” to whichever schedule option matches your class. Is your class every Mon, Weds, Fri? Tues/Thurs? Weekly?
10. In the Range section, click “until” and choose the last day of classes for the term.
11. Add the classroom number to the “Where” field.
12. Click “Save” at the top.
13. You should now be able to see your class repeating throughout your calendar! Repeat for your other classes.
14. Create another calendar – options include work, activities or clubs, dedicated classwork time,  assignment due dates. Schedule some events for your new calendar.
15. Check out the email reminders section in the event details window. If you decide to include something like due dates, you can have Google Calendar email you a reminder ahead of the date so you don’t forget!

Google Calendar Tutorial

Welcome to Google Calendar

This lesson was created for the Digital Media Project, a joint project of UBC School of Library, Archival and Information Studies and the Irving K Barber Learning Centre.