Office Romance | Resource Planning Software And Google Calendar

Although the best way to plan resources is with Gantt charts and a software that’s flexible enough for all the data you have, on an individual level, Google Calendar is the royalty of making plans. You can be as detailed as you want. You can schedule tasks like “Take a power nap” without it making to the project status report. In addition to the bigger tasks, you can draw up a daily to-do list. You can see it from all of your devices. You can have many different calendars or morph all of them into one. Brand new information, huh? However, have you heard about a romance in the office that's been going on for a while now? Not the one about Pam and Jim. The one about Ganttic and Google Calendar sync. To be more precise, did you know you can sync plans made in Ganttic to Google Calendar? You can and you should. Resource planning software and Google Calendar are a good match that will make your life easier. And it's a romance you don't have to report to human resources department.

HALF THE TIME BLOCKING DONE FOR YOU

Time blocking can be the perfect way to organize everything that’s going on in your life. As a bonus, it can make you a lot more efficient and productive. Since Google Calendar is one of the most popular calendar apps out there, it’s often used for time blocking. If you are one of the people that are using Google Calendar for that, you already know why I’m talking about it in the context of resource planning. Entering all of your personal and work-related tasks to Google Calendar can be quite a ride. Wouldn’t it be great if someone did half the work for you? We got you! Well, actually the person that does the resource planning has got your back. You just have to synchronize your resource to Google Calendar, and all the tasks that are connected to the resource will be imported to the calendar that you have selected. Now you can see all your work-related tasks in Google Calendar, and you only have to add the other things. If you use one-way sync, you can edit the tasks in Google Calendar to mix in a bit of Pomodoro method without messing anything up in Ganttic. Talk about efficiency. Saving time in being more efficient. That's the kind of romance you actually have time for, right?!

ALL THE IMPORTANT MEETINGS IN YOUR TEAM’S CALENDARS

The first person that you tell about your fresh office romance should be your boss, then the rest of your coworkers if you feel there's a need for it. When it comes to the romance between the resources in Ganttic and Google Calendar sync, you should tell everyone. Right away. No one should be left in the dark. Your resource is not the only one that should be synced. You should encourage your whole team to do the same if they are using Google Calendar for their everyday planning. Why? That way, you can be sure that all the meetings that you plan, will be on their calendars. Automatically. When you are sending out the agenda, they already know which meeting it’s for. If you like to plan a long time ahead, you know the tasks you have planed have appeared in their calendars way before there’s anything else. And again, it’s just a good way to make planning and scheduling life a bit easier.

GET NOTIFICATIONS OF NEW TASKS

Ganttic is a resource planning tool that’s meant to be used from a desktop device. No long-term Gantt chart based visual planning can be done from a tiny screen in an app. We don’t want to do that to you. But the mobile notification thing is kinda great right. Imagine you want to rant about your boss booking another meeting about you-don’t-know what in Slack or any meeting so you keep an eye on those two that might be the new office couple. You would want to do it right when it happens. You wouldn't want to discover it hours later when the discussion isn’t much of a hot topic anymore. So sync with Google Calendar and turn those notifications on. 

PROJECTS TO GOOGLE CALENDAR WITH ONE-WAY SYNC

If you are the kind of person that needs to know about everything and all things in addition to everything, it can be done. If you are the kind of person that needs to know only the things you need to know, it can be done, too. Our Google Calendar Sync is built in a way that you can choose what you want to see on your calendar. It's a flexible love affair. I don't know what's that supposed to mean but it really is. First, you have to choose if you want to use one-way or two-way sync. The latter is a bit of a risky road to take, since the changes you make to the synced tasks in Google Calendar, will come back to Ganttic. For example, you like to give your tasks funny names in Google Calendar to brighten your day up, make sure you are using one-way sync. I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t want “Status Meeting” to be renamed to “Arguments with Andrew” in the resource planning software where Andrew and every other stakeholder can see it. Additionally, if you use two-way sync, all the events from the calendar that you syncing with will be synced to the resource planning software. Make sure you aren't shipping your personal stuff to where it doesn't belong. If you want to see project title in Google Calendar, you can only use one-way sync. All the additional data like custom data fields and notes can only be synced with one-way sync. So you can make changes to the all you want, it won’t come back to Ganttic.

ALL-DAY TASKS IN GOOGLE CALENDAR

One thing that you should know about is the way that all-day tasks will translate into the language of Google Calendar. They won’t cover the whole day like they do in the resource planning tool. They’ll appear above the other tasks of the day. So if you are used to the romance that consumes your whole day, it might be weird to see it as something that's just hanging above you. Make sure you and your team aren’t leaving them unnoticed.

Are you already using Ganttic’s Google Calendar synchronization? What’s your use case? Which improvements are you looking for?