Your Friendships Need GCal
It’s like a friendship bracelet for the 21st century.
Ever so mysterious is the square of nine dots in the upper-right corner of Google Drive. So many apps with which we are not acquainted, so many pages to which we can sync our account! Thus I ask of you: consider the Google Calendar, AKA GCal.
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My close friends and I have welcomed GCal into our lives in order to better handle the logistics of making plans. The most helpful GCal function is the ability to share your calendar with others, something that sticks the schedule of your friend right next to your own so you can easily assess which chunks of time work for both of you. Gone is the excruciating back-and-forth, the accidental double booking, the “Shit, I totally forgot we had plans!”
You no longer have to ask why you never see your friends anymore — instead you can create an event and share it with your buddy, link the location, and set a reminder. You can even color coordinate!
This is not how the app is marketed — Google describes it as a time-management service and advertises the feature of setting work hours so that your coworkers know when to reach you. This is a mistake — that’s what Slack is for! GCal is for you and your girlfriend with four jobs to set a good time to go to Olive Garden. There’s even an option to make events private so you don’t have to share everything with everyone. No panopticon over here, baby!
Far be it for me to advocate dumping your bullet journal — I myself have a physical planner to track assignments with a myriad of colorful pens, and to cherish the feeling of writing a check mark next to a bullet point. Who says you can’t do both?
GCal is Find My Friends without the creepiness, and it saves you from sending the “what are you doing tonight?” text. Because, as my own best friend and paralegal pointed out, I don’t need to know where you are right now — I need to know where you are tomorrow night!
