• Home

  • Productivity

  • App tips

App tips

2 min read

You can now split your working hours in Google Calendar

Create multiple segments of working hours each day to accommodate nontraditional schedules

By Justin Pot · March 9, 2021
A hero image for Google Calendar app tips with the Google Calendar logo on a blue background

The workday evolved in 2020, and tools are adapting to accommodate that. Google announced a few subtle tweaks to Google Calendar. The main one: you can segment your work day into multiple chunks. 

The Working Hours feature in Google Calendar, with each day M-F split between 6-10am and 1-5pm

The working hours feature lets you indicate which hours are part of your work day, which is important when someone else is trying to schedule a meeting with you. For example: my manager, Deb at Zapier, works 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Eastern. Here's how it looks when I try to schedule an appointment with her.

Deb's working hours are white and the rest of the calendar is gray

Until this change, it was only possible to set up a single block of time, as shown above. Now you can add multiple segments.

In the first screenshot in this article, you can see I segmented my time into two blocks: 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. followed by 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Here's how it looks for Deb when she tries to schedule an appointment with me. 

Google Calendar with a gray background during Justin's non-working hours

As you can see, the middle of the day is now grayed out. It's subtle, but Google makes it more specific I'm not working if Deb tries to book my time. 

When trying to schedule an appointment, a purple "Outside working hours" label appears

This is important on remote teams because unusual schedules are part of what makes remote work great. Some people on my team, for example, work an early morning shift and a late afternoon shift so they can spend the middle of the day doing distance learning with their kids. Others work a nontraditional schedule because it helps them focus. 

Google's change means people who work a few shifts every day will be able to show this in their calendar. 

Take a look at how you can power up all of your Google apps using automation.

There's another, related change: you can now set up recurring out of office appointments. Google Calendar's out of office feature lets you block off a chunk of time that you'll be away from work, then automatically declines all current and future appointments during that time. The recurring out of office feature means you could, for example, set the fourth Friday of every month as a day you won't be working. You can also set your work location.

Again, it's a small change, but one that reflects how remote work is changing the way we all work. 9-to-5, five days a week is a relic of the past—the tools we use are increasingly reflecting that. 

Zapier has been an entirely remote team for a decade, so these are issues we've thought about a lot. Check out our ultimate guide to remote work for more.

Get productivity tips delivered straight to your inbox

We’ll email you 1-3 times per week—and never share your information.

tags
mentioned apps

Related articles

Improve your productivity automatically. Use Zapier to get your apps working together.

Sign up
See how Zapier works
A Zap with the trigger 'When I get a new lead from Facebook,' and the action 'Notify my team in Slack'