Transcription
Hey everyone, it's Tonyan. I hope you're having a wonderful day.
So, a couple weeks ago, I posted a video of how to get straight A's, and you guys seem to really enjoy it. So today, I figured I would show you how I plan and organize my time because a big part of being successful academically or in school is knowing how to properly manage your time. And I feel like it's a skill that a lot of people don't really have because no one really teaches them. So I will be your teacher today. I will show you how I do it and how you can do you can too, specifically using Google Calendar because Google Calendar is my holy grail. It is literally the glue that keeps my life together.
Before I completely jump in, I want to give a little bit of context about a few things. So, first of all, Google Calendar isn't the only system I have in place to keep my life organized. I also have kind of like a bullet journal type thing, but I can get into all the different systems that I use in my life in another video. Specifically today, I'll be using just showing you my Google Calendar. And then also, in terms of like experience/background, I have tried a lot of different calendar organizational systems. I started my very first first agenda in grade three, color-coding it with all the pens and everything. And for many years, I was a very much physical planner girl, probably from like grade three to, I want to say, grade nine. And then probably grade 10, I started using Google Calendar and I haven't looked back since. And ever since then, I've progressively just gotten better, better. It's not really a skill, but I've figured out all the different nooks and crannies of Google Calendar. I've also tried Notion, and I just, I never really got into it. I am a big Google girl, you'll quickly see because I love how everything syncs up and everything. But that's a little bit of context.
Okay, I've now started sharing my screen so you can see exactly what I'm looking at. So this is actually my exact calendar that I use. I figured, why make a mock calendar? But I can actually show you exactly what it looks like. Hopefully, there's nothing too confidential. I don't think there is. So today is Friday, November 3rd. You can kind of see the blue circle here. I'm also going to assume that the majority of you have used Google Calendar before, so I'll give like a little bit of brief explanations, but this isn't really like an in-depth Google Calendar tutorial. It's more like how I use it personally. So right now, we're looking at the monthly overview of November. So you can kind of see it's quite full. It's not as packed as some people's Google Calendars that I've seen, but it's got its decent amount of things going on. I'll show you some other months briefly just so you kind of see what a typical month looks like for me. Now, my previous months don't look as full just because when I mark off a task completed, it disappears from my calendar. You can change that in settings if you want. But as you can see here, that's October, September, and and now my summer months were a lot less busy because I wasn't in school. As you can see, it's mostly just my work schedule. So you can just click today to go back to today.
First, I'm going to kind of go over my calendars on the side here. I have one more under here that's my school calendar. I'm just not going to scroll it so I don't show my email. You can also check off another calendar that says birthdays. Personally, I like to not have that on and I like to put in birthdays manually because if you check off birthdays in Google Calendar, it'll put all of your Google contacts' birthdays syncing into your calendar. And personally, I don't want to have that because a lot of my Google contacts aren't really people's birthdays that I want to have in my calendar. So personally, I like to manually put them in. For example, this is my friend Kevin's birthday this Wednesday. So I just put that in as an event on its own, like I would just click it and put it in for all day.
My first calendar is Tonyan Mayor. That's my name, and I use this for all personal things. So you can see here, any of the pink things are things that aren't school-related, aren't work-related, aren't social media-related, and it's not a task. So like birthdays, holidays that don't put in. I mean, it's not really a holiday. Like Black Friday, I wanted to put in. I'm like, just hanging out with a friend, that I'll put in as pink. Just things that don't fall into other categories, just kind of like miscellaneous workouts, appointments, I put in under my personal calendar. Also, I told you it's like color-coded. So if you don't know how to do that, you just go to the plus here and then you can put in the hex codes. So you can easily find color combos on Pinterest with hex codes. You just look up a color palette with with hex codes, and it will come up with a bunch. Now, personally, I just chose which ones I like because I want to have enough differentiation between my colors so when I look at my calendar, I can actually see the different categories in my life because a lot of cute color palettes on Pinterest have very similar colors, and when you look at it on your calendar, it's hard to differentiate them. So this is what I use, and I can put hex codes on the screen here that I used if you want to use the same ones. So I like how it looks.
Next, I have class schedule. You'll notice my class schedule is the exact same color as my uni calendar, and just because they're both university-related. But sometimes I like to be able to click off my class schedule so I can just see all the assignments that I have going on because uni, I put in events that I'm going to, maybe like networking events, and then also exams or some assignments I'll put under uni. So it's nice to be able to just see because it looks like a lot busier with my class schedule. And you actually notice my class schedule, I don't have that many things in it. It's because two of my classes, I skip almost every single week because they're not beneficial to me. One of them I completely deleted for the entire semester because I know I will not be showing up to any of them.
Next, I have one of my part-time jobs. So I just click off my work schedule. I'm an RA, so anything having to do with my RA job, residence advisor job. And then lastly, the tasks, which is all these red things. So if I click those, it should go off. I know why it's not. Oh, there we go. Okay, it stopped lagging. I think it's just because I was sharing my screen. Calendar normally doesn't lag like this.
So now I'm going to kind of show you how I would put in an event. This might seem kind of obvious. There are specifically things that I like to do. So for those of you who don't know, any of the solid color blocks are put in for the full day, and anything that has a small dot beside it is put in for a specific time. Things I would put for the full day are things that are really important that I want to see top and center on each day. So let me show you, like exams. It's not the full day of the exam, but I like to put it as a full day event just because it's big, bold, and I can remember it. So looking at my calendar, it's very easy to see, like this is an exam here, this is an exam here, this is an exam here. And this is an event that I want to go to. This technically, I wouldn't really need to put put in as a full day because it's not that important. And you might be wondering, okay, if you put in the full day, like how do you know what time it is? I'll just put it into the description. So if I hit edit here, you can you can see here I put in all of the timings, the timings, the weighting of my exam, and then I also like to put in sometimes on D2L, I don't know if you know what it is, like our online classroom, my professor will put in the information for the exam. So I'll literally just copy and paste that or just put in the relevant information into descriptions. Very easy to access. I'll also put the location of the the classroom that's happening in. And this isn't actually a location that will sync with Google Maps, whereas a lot of them do, but that's fine. It'll still save on its own. For example, if I were to put in an actual address, it'll sync to Google Maps, and then you can set it so that you can put in public transportation and add that into your Google calendar so you know exactly what time you need to leave. Again, another thing that I love about Google.
Okay, that was specifically for exams. I like to put in for the full day. Other things that are timed, obviously you can just put in the time. You can also change how far in advance you want a notifications. So I have it always preset for 30 minutes before, so you can get like on your phone a little ding just so you remember.
Now, in terms of reminders, I used to not use reminders and I used to only put in all of my assignments for class as events. But it's actually really nice to put them in as, sorry, not reminders, as tasks because you can check them off and then when you check them off, it'll disappear from your calendar. So for example, let's say I finished this assignment, I can say Mark completed, and you see it's gone. I actually did not want to mark that completed. So you can go on your right tab here, tasks, and then hit completed, and then I can like undo that, and it'll see it popped back up there, which is really nice. So reminders, or sorry, I don't actually use reminders. I think you can add reminders into Google Calendar possibly, but I don't find it necessary at all. And tasks, you can also time as well. You hit task here, you can add a time. For example, if they're due at midnight, that's why it says 12:00 a.m. here. And then big tasks that I don't want to forget, like assignments, I put put in as all day, similar to exams that I put in all day. So you can see it bright center, this assignment is not due all day, it's due at midnight, which I should probably put into the description. But beside the point, whereas other assignments, for example, this one, it's weekly log, I have to do every week. It's not really something that's that important and it doesn't take that long to do. So I don't need to remember in the top of my head, like, oh, I need to do this. So I just put it as a time it's due anytime that day. So I just put it as 10:00 p.m. I specifically, a lot of tasks you'll see I put it more towards like 10:00 p.m. These aren't all due at 10:00 p.m., but I like to put them later in the day because when I go to that day, I like for it to be at the bottom of my screen. So when I'm time blocking my day, it's not in the way. For example, if it was like way up here, that would be annoying to me.
While we're still on the topic of tasks, I want to say that if you're in school, university, or even like work, and you have assignments throughout the year, put them in as soon as you get them. So for example, in university, you'll get a syllabus or multiple syllabi for each class. As soon as you get that, it will have all of your exams and assignments in it. Very likely, put them in like day one because I know that the rest of my semester's assignments are already in my calendar, which is so nice because I never have to worry about like, crap, I didn't know this due date was coming up. I am very aware of every single test, assignment, exam coming up until like December.
Another thing is that you don't always have to put a time or date in for a task. So if you hit the sidebar here that says, say, tasks, you can add a task, and I actually do this all the time. Let's say, what's something I need to do? I need to vacuum. Okay, I need to vacuum my apartment. So then I'm going to hit return, and it's just going to put it in as a task. And you'll see there's no bubble underneath that has like a day or a time. So that just means if I want, I could drag and drop it into a day onto a day, and now it's got a time. You can always undo that as well. You can just put like, I think delete, yeah. And you also add details too, which is nice. And you can also star them. So if you have tasks that are more important than others, you can star them, and it'll go to the top, or you can organize it so they can go to the top, he starred recently, which is really nice as well. So I'm going to unstar those. But whenever I have something on my mind that I know I need to do, but I don't have, I haven't scheduled in what I'm going to do it yet, I'll put that in. Let's say I need a vacuum. Sometimes also as a task, I'll put in grocery shop. And then in details, I'll put in like, oh, I need to get apples, I need to get milk. And then later on, when I figure out when I have time for that, I'll actually schedule it in.
The last note that I want to make about tasks is having different, um, I don't know what they're called, lists for your tasks. So I have my tasks, which are all my big ones, and then I also have a downtime one here. So this one is all things that I want to do whenever I have a bit more downtime. They're not priority at all, but they're things that have been on very back burner that are things that I would like to finish sometimes. So I'm trying to work on a recipe book right now, and I want to design the pages. I want to look into like this travel day. I want to catch up on my marketing book. Some little documents I want to start. I like putting that in downtime, so whenever I do have downtime. And then you can just check them off, or you can also reorganize things too, which I like. For example, if I'm like, okay, today is a downtime day, I'm going to do all these things, you can drag and drop the order that you want to do things.
Okay, so next, I want to talk about specifically how I manage my time. So obviously, a lot of events or things in your life aren't flexible and you can't change the time of them. So your exams, meetings, your work schedule, you put those in automatically, you don't really get to think about what time you want to put it in. But sometimes there are things that I put into my calendar and I can kind of choose when I put them in. Up until now, we've been looking at the monthly view, but if we go on to weekly view, I like to do this when I'm more looking at like, for example, I want to go to lunch with a friend next week. Then I can go to weekly view. This is all of next week, November 5th to 11th. And I'm like, okay, I want to have a brunch with her or some sort of meal with her sometime next week. And this is such a nice visual way to see when you have blocks of time because when you're looking at the monthly view, it's kind of hard. It just looks like everyday is kind of busy except for like Friday. But then when I actually go to my weekly view, I can see, okay, I have like a big chunk on Tuesday. Like I have all this time. For example, I did this with um my friend Adrian, and I just time-blocked that in. So whenever I'm planning out events of when I'm putting them in, I like to look at weekly view.
And another thing that you have to keep in mind is things that only you would know. If someone else is looking at this, they could think, she's available from 3:00 p.m. onwards on the Sunday. But something that I'm always keeping in mind is after I'm done work, I am so tired. So I don't like to schedule in something after work this day. Also, I see here I have this assignment due at midnight. I know I need a bunch of these hours to finish that assignment. So just keeping in in mind that just because you have blank spaces in your calendar doesn't mean you should always be filling them because you have to remind yourself that right now thinking ahead, you might think you can do all these things, but day of, you're going to be remind yourself, like, you're human, you're going to get tired, you're not a super, super human, and you shouldn't be filling in every block of your day. Which sometimes I am very guilty of doing, and I'm trying to get better at that because as you can see here, like this Wednesday, I was so exhausted. I had so much going on, and I did all of these things. I had literally 10 things, like going from this to this to this to this. So tired at the end of the day, and the next day too, I felt it. So just remind yourself that just because you have 24 hours in a day does not mean you should be um time-blocking in every single thing.
Speaking of time-blocking, I do want to go into that actually. So for time-blocking, I do this occasionally, not every day, but I'll kind of explain how I use it. So when I time-block, I like to put it either in weekly view or 4-day view. 4-day view is nice because it shows you today and the next 3 days. Days whereas the weekly view, it'll just show you like the calendar week view. So because it's Friday, it already shows me the past like 5 days. So when I time-block, is typically when I have a bunch of things that I need to do and I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed and I'm not sure when I'm going to do everything. And I'll typically time-block for either day of, so I'm like, okay, today I have all these things I need to do, I'm going to time-block. Or I'll do it for like the next day or the day after. So between 1 to 3 days in advance. Let's say I have a bunch of things to do tomorrow, and I'm just kind of feeling a bit like in my head. Okay, so I'm like, okay, I already have work in here. Let's say I want to work out tomorrow, which I actually don't work out on the days that I go to this because I'm just always tired afterwards. But let's say I work out, I always give myself 2 hours to work out. That includes like getting ready and everything. Oh, that's another thing. You can be very vague with your time-blocking or very specific. So you could put in 15 minutes to get ready for gym, 5 minutes, 10 minutes to get to gym. When I whenever I just put workout, that's the entire block that includes, you know, getting dressed, packing my bag, walking to the gym, at the gym, stretching, walking back from the gym. So I just put in a 2-hour block for workout, and it's so nice. We can just drag and drop things to see how they fit. Another thing that you can time-block in are meals. So sometimes in the days that I feel very busy, that I know I just need to literally time-block every single thing into my day, I will schedule in my meals. So I normally give myself about half an hour for my meal. I'll put in breakfast, and then I can save it.
Another thing that I want to note is remind yourself that you're probably the only one who's going to be looking at your calendar. Don't worry about it being perfect. I used to be like this, like everything has to be named perfectly. But now I don't worry about that because as long as I understand what it means, that's all that matters. Let me find a good example of something that you guys probably wouldn't understand what it means, but I do. For example, you see blue gold. Like, what does that mean? These are the days that I'm on call for RA, and there's blue shifts and gold shifts. So I could put in like, blue shift on call with Tenen, but I don't need to put in the on call and shift words because I already know that it's the back of my head. So I just put in blue with Tenen because I want to know what color shift I have and who I'm on call with, and that does the trick for me.
So on the side tab here, above tasks, we also have Google Keep. I'm going to quickly go over how I use that. I used to actually never use it, but I've been using it a bit more frequently, I would say this past month, and I still want to use it a bit more more than my notes app on my iPhone because I find that myself, and probably a lot of you guys too, are constantly out of Apple storage. Whereas Google storage, there's a lot more. So it'll continue to sync because if you're out of Apple storage, they don't continue to sync, and so my laptop and my phone aren't constantly synced. But Google Keep does. So I like to use this for a few different things. Whenever I just have a quick thought that I want to just like write a note, you can just scribble it down. Also, I like to actually put my full grocery list here because I put in a list. So milk, apples, and then you can hit done. That's another thing. You can open up Google Keep into a separate tab, and you can look a bit more into it. So you can kind of see some YouTube video ideas. Actually, oh, and here there are reminders. Remember I mentioned that I think there are reminders? There are. As you can see, I don't use them. You could definitely look into that if you want it to.
Lastly, I just want to touch on how I set up my laptop and my phone to have my Google Calendar very accessible. So for my Google Calendar, I always have a bookmarked. So this left bookmark here is my calendar. You can see the star there. And so it's just very easy to access. And then for my phone, I like having my Google Calendar as a widget on my home screen because then I can easily see what I have going on that day. And then it's also really nice because on your iPhone, on the lock screen, if you swipe left, you can see your Google calendar and all the events also happening the day. So it's very easy to access and just make sure your notifications are on. Personally, I don't really rely on my laptop to send me notifications because I never have it always on me. But my iPhone, I always have on me, and it's easy to get a notification and see what's coming up if I forget about it. But typically, I don't really rely too much on the notifications just because I'm literally constantly checking my Google Calendar to look ahead. Not only for the day of, but I'm constantly kind of looking at my monthly view just to see like what I have going on in my life.
Okay, so that about wraps it up. I feel like this video was a little bit more chaotic in terms of my thoughts throughout the video, but I hope it made somewhat sense and you picked up a tip or two that will help you in either starting your Google Calendar journey or continuing it. Let me know if you guys have your own personal Google Calendar tips, tricks, etc. Thank you guys so much for watching. Like it if you like the video, subscribe if you want, um, and I'll see you in the next one.
[Music] Bye.
Oh, hello Papa. H. [Music] What's what's?