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| #1 View in the left-side navigation |
As some of you may know, I'm a fanatic about Google Calendar and have been for many years. I started really getting into using it back in 2010. At the time, I was working as an EdTech Coach full-time and it was an excellent way to organize my time. It also became a way to "justify" my job, because some segments of the school community were wondering why positions like mine exist. My calendar became a form of evidence that I could share to explain how my time was being used. As I moved to my next role as a Head of School, it was a form of accountability for the Board, faculty, and parents. During the next several jobs that I held, I continued to use Google Calendar to organize my time and also as a method of explaining my work to others. Which brings us to my current role as Director of Technology at St. Johnsbury Academy Jeju, where I am actually starting to use the color coding in calendar to track how and where my time is being used. If you haven't gotten this granular with Google Calendar, I am going to recommend that you do. The
visual quality of the data alone is helpful. As you can see in screenshot #1, this is what you see in Google Calendar on your left-side navigation. Using the "More insights" button will provide a new view, which is the "Time breakdown" panel. I find the "By color" option to be more useful for me, but you should
definitely experiment and find a system that works for you. One thing that I found was that I need to be careful with the different colors so that each one actually has a true meaning and allows me an opportunity to really document where my time is being used. For example, rather than specifically mentioning something like PowerSchool, I have the division of the school ES, MS, HS. When I do something, regardless of the program or tool used, I'm tracking which division I was doing it for, not that tool was used. This is a decision based on who I'm showing this data to later. Based on the population of each division, I want principals to be able to see how much of my time their division is getting. When it comes to my regular view in Google Calendar, I find the weekly view (screenshot #3) is more helpful to my job overall. Again, you should play around with different options to find the view that works best for your situation.
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| #3 Week view in Google Calendar |
