How to Color Coordinate Events in Google Calendar

Keeping your Google Calendar organized can present quite the challenge if you have many events to manage. Classes, meetings, work, social commitments and other events can quickly turn your calendar into an unintelligible mess. However, Google Calendar provides a number of solutions that can help to keep your events organized and manageable. Color coordinating is one such feature that lets you see at a glance which events you have scheduled for a given time period.

While you can color code individual events in Google Calendar as needed, one simple shortcut for keeping work, personal and school life separate is creating a calendar for each. In Calendar, click the arrow next to “My Calendars,” select “Create New Calendar,” name the calendar and add a description, and then click “Create Calendar.” Select the new calendar from the “My Calendars” drop-down list, and then pick a color; any new events for that calendar are automatically assigned the chosen color. Make individual calendars for categories of your life to keep events organized.

Some events may fall outside of your chosen calendars. When this occurs, you can use Google Calendar’s color-coding option to choose a color as necessary -- simply select from the “Event Color” options while on the Create page. Try to keep your colors to a specific theme, as color coding implies that the colors are important and that events of a specific color apply to a specific thing. If you aren’t careful with color selection, the colors in your calendar may end up losing their meaning.

You can change the color of a created event at any time. This is handy if you didn’t start your Google Calendar with color coding but wish to switch it over to a more organized system. Click the event you want to change, select “Edit Event,” adjust the color in the Event Color area, and then click “Save” to apply the change. If the event is part of a series, you can choose whether the color change applies only to that event or to all events in that specific series.

The most difficult aspect of changing the way you deal with responsibilities and social engagements is sticking with the change. Color coding your calendar will only work if you’re willing to stick with the system you’ve created for yourself. Make an effort to ensure that all new calendar entries follow the color-coding rules you’ve created. If you are careful to follow your own rules for a couple of months, color-coding will eventually become second nature.