6 ways to automate Google Calendar at work

Calendars can be your best friend—or worst nemesis. They help you keep track of critical appointments, but often your schedule fills up fast—with many competing priorities. 

Zapier can help you automate your Google Calendar so you can focus on scaling your business, not managing your schedule. We've collected a few Zaps—what we call our automatic workflows—so you can quickly connect Google Calendar to your favorite apps.

Skip ahead

• Get meeting reminders

• Prepare for upcoming events

• Cross-post between calendars

• Manage appointments and video calls

• Create events from tasks

• Use webhooks with Google Calendar

Get meeting reminders

Between video calls, managing your inbox, and responding to chat, it's easy to forget that you have something on your calendar when you're focused on another task. The same is true for clients you need to meet with. 

These Zaps will automatically remind you, your team, or your clients about an upcoming meeting through email or a team chat app. That way, you'll never keep a client waiting—and you won't be left hanging either.

Prepare for upcoming events

Of course, it's not enough to show up to the meetings on your calendar. You always need to be prepared—but it can be difficult to fit in prep time when you're wearing many hats. 

Whether you're gearing up for a client meeting, pitch presentation, or other event, these Zaps can help you make time to prepare. Whenever a new event is added to your Google Calendar, Zapier will automatically create a task in your favorite to-do app or project management tool.

You can customize your trigger—the event that starts a Zap—so that only certain calendar events will generate tasks. You can also set it so the same tasks appear every time if you'd like.

Zapier can also automatically create agendas or other meeting documents from a template.

Cross-post between calendars

Depending on your role, you may have to manage multiple calendars. Perhaps you have different calendars for each team you manage, or you're managing a client calendar on top of your own. 

These Zaps will cross-post new Google Calendar events to your calendar of choice, so you don't have to worry about juggling multiple schedules or posting to the wrong calendar.

Manage appointments and video calls

It's hard enough remembering (and showing up) to the meetings with your colleagues. What about invitations from people outside of your workplace? It's one thing to forget about a meeting with a coworker, but forgetting about an appointment with an outside client is bad news. 

These Zaps will create Google Calendar events whenever someone invites you to a video call or schedules an appointment with you through a booking app like Calendly.

If you schedule appointments through a form app, these workflows will ensure they're accounted for in Google Calendar. 

Create events from tasks

There are the events that happen on a regular schedule, like your standing team meeting every Thursday. Those are pretty easy to manage. The events that can be harder to plan for are the ones that occur when something specific happens, like when a deal reaches a certain stage in your sales cycle.

You can use a Zap to create a calendar event when specific tasks are added to your task manager of choice, like Notion or Trello. 

If you need to have a meeting when you receive certain information, like an updated row in a spreadsheet, Zapier can also help you schedule calls automatically. 

Use webhooks with Google Calendar

Perhaps you use an app that doesn't have a Zapier integration, but you want to create a Google Calendar event when something specific happens in your app. 

If your app has webhook functionality, you can use Webhooks in a Zap. (Webhooks is a premium app, which requires a paid Zapier plan to use.)  

Supercharge your calendar with automation

With a little automation, you'll have a schedule that manages itself so you can focus on running your business. If you need extra help managing your calendar, check out these Google Calendar tricks:

Related reading: 

• How to easily integrate Gmail and Google Calendar

• 8 Google Calendar features you should start using now 

• The power of Google Calendar's out of office feature 

• How to add new Google Calendar events to Notion

This article was originally published in March 2021, and was updated in March 2022 by Krystina Martinez.