Ok, so the first thing you need to do is turn on Keyboard shortcuts in Google Calendar.
You do this by:
- Opening Google Calendar on your computer
- In the top right corner, click the Settings icon (the little cog) and then click on Settings.
- In the “Enable keyboard shortcuts” section, click on the checkbox to enable shortcuts.
You’ll now have access to the 25 keyboard shortcuts linked to Google Calendar.
Using shortcuts to improve productivity
Ok, so there’s 25 keyboard shortcuts, so what? Which of those do I need to know to improve my productivity? Great question, I’m so glad you asked that!
There’s really only a handful of keyboard shortcuts that will improve your productivity and they are as follows:
- Changing Google Calendar views
- Creating, editing and saving events
- Going to specific dates
1. Changing Views
There are six different views in Google Calendar and each of these can be accessed by a keyboard shortcut:
- 1 or d = Day View
- 2 or w = Week View
- 3 or m = Month View
- 4 or x = Custom View
- 5 or a = Schedule (also known as Agenda) View (wondering why it’s not ‘s’ to see Schedule view? That’s because ‘s’ will take you directly to Google Calendar Settings)
- 6 or y = Year View
Use these keyboard shortcuts to quickly switch between Google Calendar views on your computer.
2. Creating, editing and saving events
- To create an event from any view just tap ‘c’ on your keyboard. The full event creation screen will open up and you can instantly create an event as per normal.
- Made a mistake? Just tap ‘Esc’ on your keyboard to get out of the event screen without saving any details
- To edit an event, hover your mouse over the event and then tap ‘e’ on your keyboard. The full event details screen will open up to allow you to make any edits you want.
- Made a mistake? Just tap ‘Esc’ on your keyboard to get out of the event screen without saving any details
- To delete an event, hover your mouse over the event and then tap Backspace or Delete on your keyboard. And whoosh, the event will be deleted.
- Made a mistake? Use CTRL + Z (or CMD + Z) to undo the deletion. This will only work for the first couple of seconds though.
- To save an event use CTRL + S or CTRL + Enter (or CMD + S / CMDR + Enter).
Going to specific dates
I probably use these shortcuts the most, even though I’ve left them to last here! It just makes life so much easier when I’m trying to access a specific date, either in the past or future.
- Tap on ‘g’ on the keyboard to bring up a little text box where you can enter any date you like. By default it has today’s date in it which is weird but you can put any date in that you like. There are a couple of things to be aware of with this date box:
- The text format will depend on what language you’ve selected (I’ve got English UK selected hence DD MMM YYYY but English US shows up as MMM DD YYYY).
- Also you can use either DD/MM/YYYY or MM/DD/YYYY format but make sure you’ve set that up properly in Settings first (see the second screenshot) as it’s not linked to your language setting.
- No matter where you are in the time-space continuum of Google Calendar, tapping ‘t’ on the keyboard will bring you straight back to today’s date.
- To move forward in a view, tap on ‘n’ or ‘j’. So, if you’re in Week view and you tap either of those keys you’ll move forward a week. But if you’re in Month view, then you’ll move forward a month.
- To backwards in a view, tap on ‘p’ or ‘k’. Just like moving forward, this means if you’re in Day view, you’ll move back by one day. But if you’re in a Custom view, then you’ll move back the same custom number of days.
And there you have it
The best Google Calendar shortcuts to improve productivity in less than 5 minutes!
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