Have you heard of “Timeboxing”? It’s the principle of choosing the most important areas of your life—from family to exercise to community to work—and ‘boxing’ them out on your calendar with precise start and stop times.
It’s a technique that Microsoft’s corporate vice president of Modern Work, Jared Spataro apparently uses daily.
“There are 10,080 minutes in a week, [with timeboxing] you can be the boss of all those minutes if you take control.”
Yet, taking control of calendars, organizing meetings and booking rooms, scheduling training programs, keeping track of projects or trying to coordinate team members is not a simple thing to do.
With multiple data sources to cross-reference, including SharePoint lists and libraries, Teams groups, Outlook calendar and even iCal feeds, it’s easy to become overwhelmed by all the information.
However, once you learn how to overlay calendars in SharePoint, Teams, Planner, or iCal, scheduling, planning, even “timeboxing”, becomes so much easier to do.
With a calendar overlay solution, you can become so much more organized and efficient. Here’s how:
1. Take a bird’s eye view of what’s going on in your organization
With a calendar overlay solution, you can have a comprehensive view of all the events and activities happening within your company. You can filter events by department or type, even location, making it easy to keep track of what’s going on at any time with daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly views. Hover or click events to view additional information, join meetings, and get task status. Plus, add events from the calendar overlay directly to your Outlook calendar.
2. Know where you should be, when
Forget having to switch between calendars on different platforms to see your schedule. With a calendar overlay solution, you can pull in multiple data sources and view where you should be, and when, in a single view. Whether that’s holidays from your company holiday feed, iCal feeds from your task management system like Asana, or information from other enterprise apps, by consolidating your calendars and tasks into a single view you can stay on top of your schedule and manage your time more effectively.
3. Avoid scheduling conflicts
If you’re responsible for booking department or company-wide meetings or training schedules, you can use a calendar overlay solution to pull in different departments, individual users, or organization-wide calendars into one view, helping to reduce or even eliminate scheduling conflicts for everyone.
4. See deadlines and milestones in one place
Juggling multiple projects or being a member of more than one team means you’re likely to have concurrent milestones and deadlines. However, with a calendar overlay solution at a glance you can plan to avoid crunch times so you can always meet your commitments without clashes.
5. Know yours, your team’s and your organization’s schedule
Never miss a company all-hands, daily stand-up or group event. Easily timebox your time around team meetings and organization-wide events, leaving space for your daily run or school pick up.
6. Color-code tasks and events to help you prioritize
Prioritize your work by customizing your calendar overlays by choosing different colors to represent each task or event. This makes it much easier for you to see what’s coming up and what’s most important to you that day/week ahead.
7. Connect with and access other tools
Connect your calendar overlay solution with other apps and services, such as email, contacts, and task lists. This way you can keep your information in one place making it easier to manage all aspects of your schedule. When your calendar is linked to Outlook it’s so quick and easy to accept, decline, and reschedule meetings. Plus, when team members get an email invite from you, they can accept, decline, or suggest a different time directly from their email too.
Calendar Overlay App
We know that managing multiple calendars and tasks is hard, especially in SharePoint, which is why we created the Calendar Overlay App.
Initially a solution-as-a-service offering for our customers, now available as an app to everyone, Calendar Overlay has been designed to make it easy for you to overlay SharePoint lists and libraries, Exchange calendars, Planner plans, and iCal feeds (Asana, Canvas, and more…) in one place.
You can use it with SharePoint and Microsoft Teams, all with enhanced customization. No matter which job role, Calendar Overlay will help you to make the most of your calendar.
Calendar Overlay is highly customizable, with multiple use cases and great for project management, conference room scheduling and displaying team member availability.
Want some inspiration? Read our recent blog post to find out five ways how to use Cloudwell’s Calendar Overlay App in your work.
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Get organized. Reduce your stress. Increase your productivity. Try Calendar Overlay App for free.
Or contact us to find out how our Calendar Overlay App can help you.