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The workday evolved in 2020, and tools are adapting to that. Google announced some subtle adjustments to Google Calendar. The most important one: you can segment your workday into several pieces.
With the working hours function you can indicate which hours are part of your working day, which is important if someone else wants to plan a meeting with you. For example: my manager, Deb at Zapier, works 08:30 to 17:00 Eastern. This is what it looks like if I want to plan an appointment with her.
Until this change, it was only possible to set a single block of time, as shown above. Now you can add multiple segments.
In the first screenshot in this article, you can see that I segmented my time into two blocks: 06:00 to 10:00, followed by 13:00 to 17:00. This’s what it looks like for Deb if she’s planning an appointment with me.
As you can see, the middle of the day is now gray. It’s subtle, but Google makes it more specific. I do not work if Deb wants to book my time.
This is important for remote teams because unusual schedules are part of what enriches work remotely. For example, some people in my team work an early morning shift and a late afternoon shift so that they can learn with their children at a distance in the middle of the day. Others work according to a non-traditional schedule because it helps them focus.
Changing Google means that people who work a few shifts every day can show it in their calendar.
There’s another related change: you can now set up recurring appointments outside of office. Google Calendar Off-Office Feature this allows you to turn off some time off from work, and then automatically dismiss all current and future appointments during that time. The repeating outside function means you can, for example, set the fourth Friday of each month as a day you will not work.
Again, this is a small change, but it reflects how remote work is changing the way we all work. 9 to 5, five days a week is a relic of the past – the instruments we use increasingly reflect this.
Zapier was a completely remote team a decade long, so these are issues we have been thinking about a lot. Look at us ultimate guide to remote work for more.
This article by Justin Pot was originally published on the Zapier blog and is published here with permission. You can read the original article here.
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