Transcription
Guys, my name is Ali Al carulli. I am a systems engineer and a postdoctoral fellow at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, also a part-time entrepreneur. And in this video, I'm going to show you how you can master Google Calendar, which in turn will master your productivity. Because if you have total control over your time, and you're conscious and aware and systemized in how you spend your time, then achieving your goals is just a matter of time, since you'll go ahead and put in the work during those time blocks.
So, what I'm going to go ahead and do is show you how I use Google Calendar, uh, not just to make progress on my job at NASA, but also my business and my personal life. How I can balance, uh, different projects. And by the end of the video, you'll be able to, uh, set a schedule and finally stick to it. I know it's a very common thing. You probably tried this before. You tried the color blocking, uh, you tried the time blocking, you tried to set a time to do something, you scheduled things, and you may have done it for like a few days, and you always fall off. And you wonder why that is. Well, in this video, I'm going to go ahead and address all these things in detail.
Now, um, just to be clear, if you're not using a calendar, if you're not, uh, it doesn't have to be Google Calendar. Personally, I like Google Calendar because it's very, very simple, it's very intuitive, uh, it's cross-platform. You can use it on your computer, you can use it on your phone. And towards the video, we're going to talk a little bit as well on what you can do during your phone. But the very first thing that you notice here, before I even get into what's actually on the calendar, uh, is the fact that there are different colors. There's, there's, there's things going on here. And, um, I really like to categorize my life in different categories. Um, some people, some people like this, some people do not like that. I think it's extremely effective.
So, first step is, before, before we even dive into the calendar, you need to take a look at your life and say, well, um, how many categories of life do I have? Like, what are the things am I trying to do in life? So you say, okay, I maybe have my job, and I want to start and scale a business on the side, and I also want to learn piano, and I also want to work out, and I want to go to the gym and do things like that. And it, there's nothing wrong with having multiple goals. Obviously, the fewer goals you have, the better you can focus your time and attention. But suppose you have like four or five goals, or, or, or maybe even like, let's say even three that you really want to focus your time and attention on. Well, you first need to be clear what those categories are. Because before we even dive into the tactical stuff with calendar, you need to consciously be aware of, like, whenever, whenever there's something that you need to do, um, does that thing fall within the categories that I'm trying to make progress on?
So, as you can see over here, at the very top, uh, this is, I think, a very underutilized, uh, trick that you can use in Google. Is you can set an event and, and make it like over a few months, and that way it will always cling on the top of your calendar. And you can basically figure out what the categories that you have in life are, and you can write down a goal for each category. For me, there's one for my business, there's one for my job, there's one for my other business. I have two, two businesses, one around helping entrepreneurs, one around helping engineers, and I do both of them part-time. And it is very important to me that before I even, uh, dive into scheduling and do anything of that nature, to have these goals constantly on the top of my head. Because these, these goals basically serve as a compass and as an anchor of not only what are the categories in my life that I'm trying to make progress on, but also where actually am I trying to go.
I'll give you a very simple example. Suppose I wake up one morning and I see all sorts of emails about a new way to, I don't know, adopt like a new product feature, uh, whatnot within my business. Um, just by checking my calendar daily and seeing that this goal is lingering on top, uh, it is very easy for me to say, uh, nope, that's actually not where I'm trying to go. Maybe that's cool for later, but that's going to deviate me from my focus. So again, it's very important that you figure out what the categories are, uh, label them. In my case, uh, I, I, I have, again, business, business number one, business number two, job. And you set a crystal clear goal for each one of these categories. That way, you're intentional about how your, how the rest of your calendar looks like.
And as you can see here, I have color coding, which helps a ton. For example, the, the dark blue is for Next Level Systems. The this orangish red is for The Dazzling Engineers. This one is for my NASA job. And then it actually also helps me visualize and subconsciously know where my time is going. As you can see, majority of my time goes to my NASA job, second, it goes to my business, third, it goes to this other business. Uh, and based on that, I'm able to figure out, okay, well, if I say that I want to make progress on my business, but I'm only allocating less than 10% or 5% of my time to it, am I really trying to make, uh, progress on it? Sometimes it's as simple as allocating more time to the thing that you want to do.
Right now, you might, I know you're thinking, wow, this is so cool, this is organized, blah, blah, blah. But like, I, I, I can't, I, I don't even usually make it to this page. And, and the reason most people don't make it to this page is there's actually a secret. Again, before I dive into this, uh, is that I actually, um, subtract before I add. What I mean by that is, the reason I'm able to stick to my calendar very frequently, and again, I'm going to dive into this deeper towards the end when I talk about the phone, is that I have my calendar over here as the main, the number one app, uh, that's on my phone. So most people have this as like messages, blah, blah, blah, WhatsApp, I don't know. For me, it's like calendar, ChatGPT, notes. And then if I need to message someone, I'll go summon the messaging app. Why not? So that's another way that I'm constantly like having the calendar in my face. The more you can have it in your face, the better you're going to be, a lot more likely to stick to it.
So that pretty much covers the idea of the categories, the goals, um, and the colors. Obviously, you want to assign colors that make sense based on your life. Now, another underrated thing that a lot of people don't, uh, know about Google Calendar is the fact that you can use tasks. And tasks are pretty cool, like to-do lists. So you can just use it as its own, like to-do list. As you can see over here, you can even, uh, use the same categories that we just described previously to assign a to-do list for each category. And then you can use it as a to-do list on its own. But the really nice thing is that because it's integrated over here with Google, once you have a category for each thing and you know what your goal is, then you can go ahead and make, uh, specific tasks, uh, that that will relate to the goal that you're trying to achieve.
So again, in this case, for example, for the two engineers, let's say my goal is to upload two times per week. Let's say my task is, well, I don't even know what video topic to make. So then I can make a task which is like, sit down, research ideas for 15 minutes. And then I can see like a time block that I have for there that is available. And then I can go ahead and schedule it for that, uh, time block. And then the nice thing about tasks is, once you get it done, you mark it as complete. It, it does get scratched like this visually, which I think is pretty cool. It gives you kind of a little dopamine hit, like a little, little bit of a reward, like I want to, want to get it done, so I get that satisfying feeling of scratching it. But the other nice thing is that once you do scratch it, uh, it stays there on your calendar. So it acts as evidence that you actually went ahead and did something.
And actually, I made a presentation about this a while back where for people who really struggle with procrastination, people who really struggle with like a low self-esteem due to lack of productivity, one very common thing I would always recommend for people is to do this thing specifically, which is even it's something so simple as like, I don't know, get out of bed, take shower, uh, like plan day, do things of that nature. Just being able to look back on your day and see that you got things done and stacking tasks done one after the other, that's going to help you build a little bit of a momentum, a little bit of self-esteem, uh, and then you'll be able to go ahead and and just and just get things done. Uh, and then once that you can, you can, you can go ahead and tackle, uh, more difficult things.
So that's pretty much as far as tasks go. I would recommend it. I don't use it for like every, this is not my main to-do list. Uh, my main to-do list is something else that I'm working on, probably like a better topic for another video. Uh, but when, when I'm trying to schedule something, uh, I do find the task feature to be very, very useful. And if you're not used to connecting your time to the tasks, then I would strongly go recommend you go ahead and adopt it as a to-do list. So that's one thing I wanted to talk about.
The other thing I wanted to talk about is, um, when you go ahead and and schedule things on your calendar, how do you not forget them? Right? How do you not forget that you went ahead and scheduled something? Um, and for this, I have a secret weapon. It's a little plugin called GReminders. Uh, and, uh, it's basically, you can sign up, uh, you can do it, the first 100 emails for free. And what it does is it connects to your Google Calendar. And whenever you have an event that is scheduled, uh, it pretty much sends you an email like ahead of time. So what, what is really nice about it is, and you probably experienced this, where you schedule a meeting with someone, and it's an event, you're going to meet someone, and you, you show up. They send you reminders, and you show up, and you're going to, you're going to go and and meet someone, talk to someone, whether it be on Zoom or Google Meets or anything of that nature. This, this basically does the exact same thing for your, um, events.
So let's say, for example, in this case, I schedule to sit down and record this video called Master Calendar or whatever. Uh, what GReminders would do is ahead of time, based on how I schedule for it, it will send me an email to remind me, say, hey, tomorrow around this time, you're going to do this thing. And or today around this time, you're going to do this thing. Obviously, you don't want to abuse that and do it for like everything that you have to do, because then it's going to lose its value. But I would recommend that if there's something that, uh, is important that you want to make progress on, then you can go ahead and set a GReminder for it, for like one thing per day, such that you know that that's the thing that moves the needle. How do you know what's the thing that moves the needle? Well, we already did that by figuring out what the goal is and and kind of having it, uh, in our face constantly.
So that's one way to do it. There are other third-party plugins, apps that text you when you need to do something, and and whatnot. But this is where I really want to talk about your phone. Because the real reason that you're forgetting to do something on the calendar or not sticking to the schedule is not so much that you, you, you, you don't want to do it, or that it's boring, or that it's whatnot. There's two reasons. One, either you look at it and you see that the time comes to do it, and you don't want to do it. There's this, this could be just normal procrastination. I made a separate video about that, I'll put in the description so you can go ahead and watch it. But it could also be that you just never even make it to this page. And that's because you're distracted, you're overwhelmed, you have a million notifications, uh, you're not able to use the calendar, uh, properly.
My secret weapon to using my calendar is that I use app blocking software on my phone, that makes it such that the calendar, as well as my notes and a few other things, are the only things that are available for me to use throughout the day. So, for example, from 9:00 PM till 9:00 AM, and actually, I'm, I'm, I'm slowly increasing that window, it's becoming like 8:00 PM till 10:00 AM. Literally everything gets blocked on my phone. Like messages are gone, WhatsApp is gone, Instagram. I don't even have the app. I download it once a week on weekends. If you're checking Instagram very first thing when you wake up, yikes. That's, uh, I don't know how your productivity is definitely going to suffer. And, and I think your happiness too. But basically, I have my phone set up in a way where based on any page I'm in at any time, I just know that my calendar is this thing right here. And there's actually also a widget you can use over here for the calendar, uh, that you can, that you can have it in your face as well. So I would strongly recommend just literally putting it somewhere on your phone where you're constantly reminded of it.
And then once you're, once you open it, let's say on your phone or on your computer, again, because of the way we've configured it, you have your three goals on top, which reminds you of your goals and what you need to do. And then you just have your schedule and whatnot. And again, very, very important that you have something that's cross-platform, something that's on your computer as well as on your phone. And once you do that, then you will have mastered, uh, Google Calendar.
Now, this is something I dive into a lot deeper in my program called ADHD Entrepreneurs. So if you're an entrepreneur and you feel like you're higher up on the ADHD spectrum, I'll put a link below for our community and program where you can show up to calls and work with people and get accountability and dive deeper and stuff like that. Um, otherwise, no worries, you can watch the rest of my videos. And, uh, yeah, I will be making more videos on how to master your phone. Uh, if you have any video ideas that you, uh, are interested in, things that you want to learn about, please go ahead and leave me a comment below. Give me some feedback on the video as well, I would really appreciate that. With that being said, I will see you in the next video. Peace, love.