Google Calendar Set-up for Busy Families 👨🏽‍👩🏼‍👧🏻‍👦🏽

Using "The Incredibles" to untangle your brain and streamline your calendar

I’m a Google Calendar Evangelist and know that a well-organized schedule can be transformative, especially for busy families! Knowing that women are most often tasked with managing their family’s calendar, finding ways to reduce the stress and simplify this became a mission!

So today I thought I’d walk you through a few strategies that have worked for myself, along with countless friends, students, and clients who undoubtedly have more to juggle than I do! I’ll be using the animated Parr family from Pixar’s “The Incredibles” to help illustrate this. I think it’s a fun way to hopefully untangle some of the confusion that this topic can introduce.

First things first — let’s meet The Parr Family!

Bob - the Dad! He’s busy saving the world but is never too busy to jump in and help with school drop-off or attend sporting events.

Helen - the Mom! Also very busy saving the world, but — like most women — is also juggling the majority of household and child care responsibilities.

Violet - their daughter! She’s 14 years old.

Dash - their son! He’s 10 years old.

Jack - their infant son! He’s 1 year old.

Edna - the eccentric female helper. Edna could represent an aunt, grandparent, nanny, neighbor or other adult caregiver who jumps in to help. This can complicate your calendar set up, but if you have one of these in your life you are undoubtedly *very lucky*.

📊 THE STRATEGY

If your life involves a lot of moving parts — such as multiple children with different schedules — it can be really helpful to utilize Google Calendars as “layers”.

Each core facet of your life needs its own “layer” AKA calendar.

This allows you to be able to view specific “layers” and combine them with others to get the information you need.

While it might initially seem complicated, once set up it is FAR easier to understand, manage, and optimize than trying to coordinate everything on one calendar.

✅ACCOUNT CREATION

Since the mom, Helen, is running the show, she’s going to start by creating a Google Account of her own, and ensuring the necessary family members also have their own account.

She communicates to Bob and Edna how to create a Gmail account and has them share their email address with her. Since Violet is 14, she feels she is nearly ready for her own account but wants to maintain access to it, so she sets the account up for her and shares the credentials with Violet who is able to set her Google Account up on her phone.

Since Dash and Jack are still young, they don’t need accounts.

📅CREATING CALENDARS

Next, Helen will create various new Calendars within her Google Calendar Account. She’ll also assign a color for each calendar by hovering over the calendar name on the left side of the screen > clicking the three dots (…) > either selecting a pre-set color or clicking the + to enter a custom color.

These are the nine calendars she’ll create and their intended use:

🦹🏻‍♀️ Helen’s Events - events that only Helen is required for or needs to be aware of. We’ll color-code this red.
🧑🏻‍❤️‍💋‍👩🏻Helen & Bob - events that both parents (Helen and Bob) are required for or need to be aware of. We’ll color-code this orange (a combo of Helen’s red and Bob’s yellow, see below).
👨🏽‍👩🏼‍👧🏻‍👦🏽 Entire Family - events that all five members of their family are required for or need to be aware of. We’ll color-code this brown (a combo of all the family’s colors).
🌼 Violet - events that the parents + Violet are required for or need to be aware of. We’ll color-code this purple.
👟 Dash - events that the parents + Dash are required for or need to be aware of. We’ll color-code this green.
⚡ Jack - events that the parents + Edna are required for or need to be aware of (since Jack is a baby, he doesn’t need to be included. But since Edna is a third caregiver for Jack, having her on this calendar is helpful for the Parr family). We’ll color-code this dark blue.
👵🏻Help From Edna - Events from the Parr family that Edna is required for or needs to be aware of. We’ll color-code this light blue, as it’s often related to Jack.
👩🏻‍👦🏻Helen’s Responsibilities - since juggling various responsibilities related to their family is complex, these events get their own calendar and this one is specific to Helen’s responsibilities (Ex. Kid pick-up or cooking dinner on certain days). We’ll color-code this a pale shade of Helen’s red.
👨🏻‍👧🏻Bob’s Responsibilities - since juggling various responsibilities related to their family is complex, these events get their own calendar and this one is specific to Bob’s responsibilities. (Ex. Kid pick-up or cooking dinner on certain days). We’ll color-code this a pale shade of Bob’s yellow.

Will you need this many calendars? That depends on your family size and dynamic. At the very least I recommend a family calendar, a calendar for each kid, and that each parent has two calendars — one for “personal” obligations, and one for family-related “responsibilities”.

🔒 ADJUST PERMISSIONS

Helen will also want to share each calendar with specific members, and adjust the permissions based on how they need to use each calendar. Google gives you the following “permission” options for each person you share a calendar with:

🟢 Make changes and manage sharing: People have full control of events on your calendar. They can create new events, manage events, change share settings.
🟡 Make changes to events: People can edit events on your calendar and find who it’s shared with.
🟠 See all event details: People can find everything on your calendar, which includes event names, times, locations, and descriptions.
🔴 See only free/busy (hide details): People can only find out when you're busy. They can’t find out event names or details.

My suggestion for Helen would be to set her calendars up to be shared with the following family members using these permissions: