Shishir's Color-What-Matters Calendar Guide
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Shishir's Color-What-Matters Calendar Guide

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The Color-What-Matters Calendar Guide

Why (& how) coloring your calendar can solve your time issues.
Shishir Mehrotra

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Effortlessly color and categorize your Google Calendar events with the click of a button.

👋 Hi, I'm Shishir! And my calendar is pretty colorful.

For better or for worse, leading product teams requires a lot of events on my calendar. And don't get me wrong, I love meeting and working with my team. But there is only so much time in a day, so it's critical for me to align my schedule with what's truly important. When life gets hectic, I color code my calendar, with each color representing one of my priorities. I can then easily see at a glance where I'm spending my time, and make adjustments accordingly.

💡 Observation: Categories not colors

Why is this so hard? Here’s the list of colors from Google Calendar: Peacock, Banana, Sage, Grape, Flamingo, Lavender, Graphite, Tomato, Tangerine, Basil, Blueberry. Now think about this: which of your meetings is a “tomato”? Not so easy! Here’s the trick:
Insight: We should use names as proxies for colors, not the other way around.
This doc is constructed around that insight.

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A Coda doc to quickly color code your calendar

If you also use the colors on your calendar then you know that it's kind of painful. Coda lets me quickly categorize my doc, then change all the colors on my calendar with the push of a button.
😓 Coloring my calendar the slow way
🌈 A Coda doc to quickly color code your calendar
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Colors are really just a proxy; I think in categories ー none of my meetings are actually "tomato".
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Assign Categories to Colors
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just once. Then, categorize each of your events.
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Analytics requires an export ー today my admin exports all of my calendar events to a spreadsheet in order to do any sort of analysis.
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Sync your Calendar
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events into Coda automatically.
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It's very manual ー you have to right-click on each event to change the color.
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Color Code your Calendar
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in Coda with the push of a button.
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Charts in spreadsheets are hard ー my admin has to fiddle with pivot tables and rebuild charts to analyze where I'm spending my time.
Flip between
Analyze your Time
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and
Color Code your Calendar
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, all in one doc.
There are no rows in this table
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Ready to get started? Head to step one:
Sync your Calendar
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A few of the 25,000+ teams that 🏃‍♀️ on Coda.

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Coda is an all-in-one doc for your team’s unique processes — the rituals that help you succeed. Teams that use Coda get rid of hundreds of documents, spreadsheets, and even bespoke apps, to work quickly and clearly in one place. This template is a Coda doc. Click around to explore.
Find out how to Coda-fy your rituals.
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Connect with a Rituals Architect
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