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Chrome Extension For Google Calendar
At Shopify, we live and die by Google Calendar—it powers our meetings, reminds us of day-to-day tasks, and generally keeps our lives on track. You’re likely no stranger to the necessity of Google Calendar, either—there’s a reason that it’s one of the most popular calendar apps out there.
But Google Calendar isn’t perfect, and there are always additional customizations and tweaks that can take your calendar from a workable solution, to a perfectly personalized tool.
If you, like us, couldn’t make it through the day without checking your calendar, we’ve rounded up seven of our favorite Google Calendar extensions that you can use to optimize your calendar.
For more tools, check out our list of favorite Sublime text plugins.
- Toggl button
google calendar extension: toggl button
Toggl is a well-known time tracking software that’s especially useful for freelancers who need to track the time they spend on specific tasks. The Toggl button allows real-time tracking of your activities. Once you’ve installed it and given it access to integrate with Google Calendar, it will allow you to start the timer on specific appointments and meetings you have saved.
For freelancers, or for anyone who needs to track time spent on specific projects, the Toggl button extension can be very helpful.
- Checker Plus
google calendar extension: checker plus
Checker Plus is a handy tool that adds a calendar button in your Chrome toolbar. This button allows you to view and edit your calendar from any tab. One of its most useful functions is the built-in flexibility it provides for creating events. Checker Plus lets you highlight text from any web page containing event information and add it automatically to your calendar. It also creates a one-click button to add Facebook Events to your calendar.
Super customizable and easy to use, Checker Plus is a great way to make life a little bit easier.
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- Event Merge
google calendar extension: event merge
If you’re a visual person, Event Merge is for you. If you have multiple calendars—a work calendar, a personal calendar, and a team calendar, for example—things can get cluttered, especially if the same event shows up on all of them.
This is where Event Merge comes in. It combines the same event across multiple calendars to give you a striped, coordinated view of your events. It’s a great way to clean up your calendars, and make events more readable at a glance.
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- Google Calendar Groups
google calendar extension: google calendar groups
Google Calendar Groups is a simple concept—it allows you to create groups for the various calendars you follow, which means you can view or hide them en masse with a single click.
This is a powerful tool for those who manage groups, or need to coordinate with multiple people. Need to routinely plan meetings with a big group of participants? Add their calendars to a group to bring up all their availabilities at once, and save time clicking through everyone’s name in the list. It’s a simple solution to a routine annoyance.
- TeamCal
google calendar extension: teamcal
If you’re managing a team, TeamCal may be the tool you need. TeamCal rearranges your calendar to be horizontal, so you can view your team’s tasks and availability in a single field. It’s a highly visual way to view how your team is spending their time. Schedule shifts, vacations, and availability to ensure your team’s bases are covered.
- Google Calendar Tags
google calendar extension: google calendar tags
Working on staying organized? Google Calendar Tags can help. This extension creates a markup change that allows your chosen tags to be shown as highlighted boxes in your calendar. If you type Outreach: Call with Brian, everything before the colon will be highlighted. It’s a simple way to give your calendar a little more organization at a glance.
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- Google Calendar Plus
google calendar extension: google calendar plus
None of above meeting your needs? Looking to make a series of tweaks to really personalize how your Google Calendar looks? Google Calendar Plus is a hyper-customizable extension that gives you a series of settings to fine-tune your calendar experience.
From something as simple as allowing you to move the big red button, to copying an event to multiple dates, to simply displaying more all-day events in your weekly or daily view, this extension helps you create a calendar that’s just right for you.
best google calendar extensions
There’s no doubt about it: Google rules the internet roost. It’s our most popular search engine and email provider, and when it comes to self-organization, its calendar leads the charge, too. But Google Calendar isn’t perfect (yet). While its in-built features and capabilities are strong, there are many extensions you can add on to enhance and customize your daily scheduling—whether for work or your personal life. From calendar extensions that help you bill for off-site work, to ones that streamline team management, here are six of the best Google Calendar extensions.
Timely – for capturing all meeting time
With Timely’s handy calendar extension, you can automatically track the time you really spend across all client meetings, appointments and events. The automatic time tracking app captures hidden billable hours (like overrunning or delayed meetings), so you can bill for every bit of project contact. By auto-importing your Google Calendar events into one neat time sheet, it makes it easy to schedule your week ahead too. You can see exactly how long you spend on meetings—as well as things like email and Slack—to truly understand the cost of your own internal team communications. Just connect Timely to as many work calendars you like, and it will record all the time you spend across all events in one private timeline alongside the rest of your work activity.
G-Calize – for color codeing
Sometimes the simplest things make the biggest difference; in the case of G-Calize, it’s the effortless efficiency of color-coding. While Google Mail already color-codes your emails for clarity, G-Calize applies that same strategy to your calendar, with unexpectedly helpful results. Simply choose a color for each day of the week, then decide which view you want to use: day, agenda, week, or month. The latter three are the most effective, serving as speedy visual prompts when you’re skimming your calendar and trying to schedule events. If the idea of color-coding to enhance productivity seems suspect, give it a try; not only does it help track outstanding tasks, but it also makes forecasting that bit smoother.
Event Merge – for managing multiple calendars
Another excellent extension for visual people is Event Merge, which streamlines the process of running multiple calendars at the same time. These days many of us have at least two calendars on-the-go – one for work, one for personal lives, and perhaps one for teams, too. But as the lines between these become increasingly blurred, things get muddled and frustratingly the same event can keep popping up on all your calendars. Event Merge helps you boost productivity by simplifying things, merging duplicate events into one single occurrence and color-coding it so you can keep track of which calendar the event belongs to. If glancing at your current calendar makes you wince and long for a clean, readable agenda, this one’s for you.
Checker Plus – for extra scheduling powers
Checker Plus is a must-have if you regularly use Google Calendar and already make use of its tools and abilities. In terms of features, Checker Plus amps things up to the next level, allowing you to schedule and edit events and manage your calendar without ever having to enter Google Calendar itself. From your browser—and even when you’re offline—you can highlight information from any website and automatically add it to your events, create reminders and notifications, edit your schedule, and get a comprehensive view of your current calendar—whether that’s day, week or agenda. Easy to personalize and even easier to use, Checker Plus is like normal Google Calendar on steroids (in a good way!).
TeamCal – for a scheduling view
For managers, Google Calendar lacks one key aspect: the ability to view and manage your team’s calendars. Enter TeamCal, an extension that shows you multiple calendars at once without having to switch between Google Calendar and other tools. Using a simple, Gantt-like layout, you can detect planning gaps, avoid overbooking, and schedule working hours and holidays. The basic timeline layout lets you view every team member’s tasks and availability with a single click, and because it’s linked to your main Google Calendar, all relevant information pertaining to scheduling is automatically factored in. A straightforward, highly visual way to keep track of your team.
Collapsible Nav – for decluttering your calendar
If you’re someone who cringes at clutter and finds it hard to concentrate when your screen isn’t orderly, you may want to download Collapsible Nav. Google Calendar’s left sidebar is filled with a jumble of features most of us probably rarely use. If you don’t use it, get rid of it—or at least hide it away to free up more space for the parts of your calendar you do actually use. This simple extension features a collapse bar that hides the left sidebar, decluttering your main calendars and expanding your view of the things that matter.
Conclusion
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