How to Automate Google Calendar: 5 Setups That Keep Family Life on Track
One calendar to rule them all.
One of the “joys” of adulting is the overriding need to have a calendar. And not just one calendar - a work calendar, a family calendar, one or more school calendars, 3 sports team calendars…and on it goes. Then there are the apps - one or more apps for recipes, sports teams, school learning management systems (LMS), work email, personal email….yikes. Don’t forget the sticky notes on the fridge with reminders for next month’s book club and the baby shower invitation somewhere under that pile of paper. And while I dream of having a personal assistant (and perhaps a home manager?), the budget says nope, that isn’t happening.
So how do you make this all work? Let’s consider the tools I use every day. For me, I use Google Calendar as my central calendar, and Outlook for my work calendar. Which is, already, too many calendars. And they don’t talk to each other directly (hello, firewall). And then I have apps for meal planning, sharing shopping lists, and tracking my son’s school assignments and baseball schedule. That’s a lot to keep up with and, honestly, can be overwhelming.
I have lots of information - but that’s also a lot of apps to keep up with. As a busy mom who also runs a company more than full-time, my secret weapons are calendar integrations and automations.
In this article, I am going to share my top 5 “set it once” integrations that move everything into one central location. For me, the central location is Google Calendar - but it can be just as easy to set up for Outlook or any other digital calendar system.
Before you start - plan, plan, plan (Choose Your “Central Calendar” Setup)
Before you actually touch your calendar, it’s a good idea to decide how you want the calendar to look. You can start by downloading my free resource, the Digital Calendar Setup Planning Worksheet, to figure out which categories you want to set up.
Next, decide who is going to have access to the information, and how you want to structure that. Here are your basic options:
Option 1: Separate calendar for each family member (recommended for clarity)
What it looks like: one separate Google calendar per family member is set up (this does require creating a unique Gmail email address for each family member). You then subscribe to each individual calendar in you rmain, personal calendar.
Why it works: You can color code each person, and each person has access to their own personal, individual calendar. This can be great for tweens and teens who are learning to manage their own schedules, and you can toggle each person “on and off” in your own view when you want to only see what YOU are scheduled to do.
Tradeoff: This can be a lot of work to set up, and keep track of which calendar links to which person.
Best for: families with multiple kids + lots of activities
Option 2: One main personal calendar, color-coded by person
What it looks like: everything lives on your main calendar, but you manually assign colors per person.
Why it works: This is the simplest structure (one calendar), with a much simpler setup.
Tradeoff: While the setup is simpler, now you have to manually change event colors to differentiate between different event types. It also makes you the central admin for the calendar.
Best for: les chaotic schedules or when you want the simplest setup possible
Option 3: A “family” calendar + personal calendars (hybrid)
What it looks like: one shared “Family” calendar for kid logistics + a separate personal calendar for your stuff
Why it works: keeps kid chaos from swallowing your work/personal life
Best for: co-parents/partners who both need access to kid logistics
Option 4: One calendar per “category” instead of per person
What it looks like: Each category gets its own calendar - such as School, Sports, Meals, Work, Personal
Why it works: great for toggling layers (you can hide Sports when you’re planning the week, or look at just Meals at one time)
Tradeoff: harder to see “who” at a glance unless you add naming conventions
Best for: people who think in “layers” more than “people”
Personally, I use option 1 as the core structure (my main personal calendar plus separate calendars for my husband and son that are “subscribed to” on my personal calendar). The different calendars each have their own color, so I can visually see when there are conflicts I need to resolve.
Now for the magic
Once you have set up your main personal calendar, here comes the fun part: adding in the automatic integrations that will autopopulate the calendar, and allow you to see how all the moving pieces of your life fit together, and where there are conflicts that need resolution. Here are my top 5 integrations that reduce mom mental load and make life easier.
How to Sync the School Calendar to Google Calendar
Raise your hand if you print out the school calendar each year and hang it on the fridge with a magnet. No shame, it’s how our moms did it, and honestly, it does keep it front and center. But school these days is more complicated than it used to be - more holidays, A/B day schedules, early release, delayed start, testing days. And let’s get real - the school schedule isn’t flexible. It really does dictate so much of the rest of our schedules and logistics (who is doing pickup and drop off on unusual schedule days? Or arranging for after-school care?).
The good news is that most school districts do a good job of publishing their calendars ahead of time. You can typically find them on the school district or school website, inside the parent portal, or the school app if your school has one. And if you’re lucky, the school will offer a subscription option.
Once you locate the school’s calendar subscription option, you want to use the Subscribe/add option in Google calendar to add it to the calendar of choice (either your personal calendar or your child’s calendar, depending on how you set it up). After you add it, you can rename it (“Name’s school calendar” or similar), and color code it as needed. You should then also get in the habit of reading the school emails and flyers as they come in, and adding those events to the calendar so everything is in one place.
If you REALLY want to take the hands-off route, you can pay for a service that helps you manage the calendar chaos. My personal choice for managing school calendars is Ohai, which allows you to upload your child’s school calendar with just a few clicks. I also use the virtual personal assistant service Duckbill to scan school newsletters and pull out relevant events to add to the calendar. And since my son is a senior in high school, it is set up in his personal calendar that I subscribe to in my personal calendar, so he can look at just his calendar separately (after a few reminders that I am not his secretary anymore…).
Pro tip: Turn on reminders for “schedule disruptors” (half days, early dismissal), or enter them as All Day events so they are at the top of the calendar view and don’t disappear in the chaos
Add School Assignment Due Dates to Google Calendar
Once kids hit school age, parenting can feel like your job is part-time homework manager and science fair project coordinator. And as the kids get older, it gets more complicated. In high school, my son had 8 classes per semester on alternating A/B days. Add in the layers of complexity from quizzes, homework and projects with multiple steps, on top of the randomly scheduled early and late start schedule days, and it felt like a never-ending rollercoaster of “what’s going on now?”
One of the challenges of this time is the need to teach your kids how to manage this themselves. Talk about a critical life skill! Some kids are naturals and learn how to organize themselves at school. Others are like my son, where that level of executive function is not easy, and needs support as they learn how to plan and execute their work without the anxiety taking over.
Thankfully, many schools now have a Learning Management System (LMS) that allows teachers to organize, assign, collect and grade assignments. Some LMS examples include Canvas, Google Classroom, Brightspace (D2L), Infinite Campus and Blackboard. Most LMS systems come with a built-in calendar feature that will show your student exactly what is due and when. And, more importantly, they will include a calendar feed option that allows you to subscribe to the classwork calendar.
To add your student assignments to your master calendar, first decide where it will reside. As I mentioned earlier, I set up my son with his own Google Calendar that I subscribe to so I have visibility into his schedule. We found the calendar subscription link in Canvas, and added it as a subscription link in his Google Calendar. This approach has a ton of advantages: 1) he can easily see just his schedule and schoolwork on his calendar without navigating all of my calendar events 2) it is teaching him how to organize his schedule using a digital calendar without relying on Mom to do it for him and 3) it gives me quick insight into his workload so I have awareness (for example, if I know he has a bid exam day, I can plan a fun, chill dinner that night instead of planning a familynight out when he might be exhausted).
Pro tip: Using a dedicated calendar per kid allows you to sort through who is working on what, and gives them an on-ramp to managing their own schedule as they enter high school and young adulthood.
Sync Sports Schedules to Google Calendar
I love watching my kid play sports. What I don’t love is trying to keep track of the constantly changing schedule of games, practices, tournaments and snack duty. My son played travel soccer when he was younger, then switched to baseball in middle school. Now he plays for both a summer travel team and a fall and spring rec team, with overlapping schedules. I can only imagine how difficult this is for parents with multiple children in different sports.
Enter the sports schedule apps, like Gamechanger, TeamSnap, SportsEngine and LeagueApps. If you’re lucky, the team coach is using one of these apps to communicate with parents about scheduled practices and games. Even better, these apps also come with a subscription feature that allows you to add the events directly to a digital calendar.
If you have set up your calendar with a separate calendar per child, I recommend adding the sports feeds directly to THEIR calendars, so that it will show up in your central calendar as an event linked to that child. Alternatively, you can also add it to your calendar directly. If you choose that route, be sure to give it a color code to differentiate it from other event types. You should also get in the habit of adding other sports-related tasks to your calendar, such as buying snacks a few days ahead of when you are due to have sack duty.
Pro tip: When your child has an all-day or all-weekend tournament, swim meet or other similar event, block off the entire weekend with an all-day event. Tourmanet schedules are often released last-minute and depend on tournament performance, so give yourself lots of time for the event.
Add Your Meal Plan to Google Calendar
I am a recipe addict. I collect more recipes than I will ever have time to cook in my lifetime, and I have been known to curl up on the couch with a pile of cookbooks just to browse. That being said, I have a seriously hectic life. If I don’t plan ahead for meals, dinner falls apart pretty quickly.
I have tried a number of different approaches over the years, and right now my favorite approach is to store my recipes in the AnyList app. Any list is seriously great - you can upload most recipes ot the app straight from the web or the New York Times cooking website (a personal favorite of mine), apply your own categories, and create meal plans and shopping lists right in the app. It even lets you share shopping lists, so if you share grocery shopping duty with your partner, they have direct access to the shopping list on their own phone.
While selecting meals does require a bit of work, the app does support calendar sync, which I have set up. When it is toggled on, I can see each planned meal as an all-day event in my personal calendar, so it is right at the top of the view. When I am planning o tmy week, this gives me a quick visual overview, so I can add reminders like “defrost chicken” the day before I need it, or “place Instacart order” before I need those groceries.
Other similar apps are Paprika, Plan to Eat, Mealime, Cozi, and Eat This Much. Each has varying costs and functionalities. I prefer AnyList because it is very affordable, flexible, and has additional uses. For example, I share a house repair list in AnyList with my mom, who lives many states away, so that when I ask the handyman to visit her house every three months, he has a ready-to-go punchlist of what needs to be done.
When choosing your recipe/meal planning app, look for calendar sync as a core feature, or else you lose the time-saving advantage of the automatic calendar sync.
Pro tip: Work in regular leftover nights if not all of your leftovers are turning into lunch the next day.
Sync Your Work Calendar to Google Calendar
A lot of time management “experts” tell you to completely separate your work and life schedules. Because it’s just that easy to make sure you never have to work on a project at night after the kids go to bed, and the school nurse will definitely never call for an unexpected pickup in the middle of your work day (just checking to see if your sarcasm meter is working). Unfortunately, that isn’t reality. Home repair people work during business hours; kids get sick during the workday; and somehow you’re expected to ignore that you have a family while you’re at work, and a job when you’re home at night. No problem, right?
Now, let’s be clear - I am not advocating trying to overload and do all of the things all at the same time. But what I have learned over the last 2 decades of trying to balance it all, all at the same time, is that the best approach of full visibility, and acknowledging reality. And reality dictates that you can’t be in two places at the same time, or run a conference call for work while also being at the doctor’s office.
The problem is that most people typically have two separate calendars - one for work and one for personal schedules. However, what I have found works best is when you have just one master calendar to rule them all. This requires importing your work calendar into your personal calendar, so you know exactly what you are supposed to be doing, and when. I do not recommend setting up your calendar the other way around - your boss doesn’t need to know about your Thursday morning yoga class or Junior’s Friday afternoon doctor appointment.
Ideally the way to set this up is to set up your central calendar (for me, my personal Google Calendar) with a subscription to your work calendar, so the work events show up in both places. Typically, this is only a view-only set-up, which means you can see the work events in your personal calendar, but you can’t change them there. This structure allows you check one calendar in the morning and see everything you have going on during the day on all fronts - kids, work, personal life - everything.
But what if your work has a super strict privacy policy that won’t allow a calendar subscription? I have that exact issue, where I can’t subscribe to my work calendar due to IT policies. After months of trying to hack the system (shh, don’t tell), I finally found a work-around: I use Ohai.ai to take pictures of my work calendar each week on my phone, then upload those pictures to Ohai to create work events on my personal calendar. I then color-code the work events with a “work” color so they stand out from everything else. It’s not as easy as a calendar subscription, but it’s a LOT easier than entering all of those events manually.
And remember, this isn’t just a feature of Google Calendar. If you look around online, you can find easy tutorials on connecting all sorts of different systems: Microsoft 365 / Exchange; Apple Calendar/iCal; and even specialized calendar apps like Calendly that can write to your calendar.
Pro tip: If you have personal/family appointments you need to take care of during business hours, schedule a calendar block on your work calendar titled “Busy” or “Deep work time” so nobody can book you for a meeting during that time.
How to keep it all running
So those are my top 5 tips for creating a central calendar system that works. Once you have it set up, you need to keep it running. My bonus tip: block off 1-2 hours each week at a regularly scheduled time to check your next 1-2 weeks of events on your calendar, and make sure that everything works. I spend 2 hours every Friday morning setting up my calendar for the next week: I plan meals, schedule a time to go grocery shopping, add work events to my personal calendar, reserve classes at my favorite yoga studio, check for my son’s baseball practices and games so I know where dinner is at each night, and more. WIth this routine, I go into the weekend relaxed, knowing that everything is set up for the next week (and if Friday morning blows up, I still have the weekend to play catch-up).
Ready to set up your command center calendar?
I hope this article inspired you to organize your many calendars into one central digital calendar. If you’re ready to jump in, head to my website and download my free resource, the Digital Calendar Setup Planning Worksheet, which will help you start the process. If you liked what you read and want to read more, please subscribe to my free Substack newsletter below, and join our growing community on Substack of real-life moms exchanging ideas on how to survive the chaos of life. Hope to see you there!
