Delegate Tasks and Scheduling with a Shared Calendar

Whether in personal, family, or work life, there are always more options than available time. You can’t do it all. And that’s okay!

You just need to learn and practice the fine art of delegation.

Many tasks need to be shared with or passed to the appropriate person. You can use a shared calendar to delegate these tasks and responsibilities without losing sight of them.

You can also use a shared calendar to delegate scheduling. For example, it’s much easier to let employees or volunteer enter their availability into a shared calendar, rather than tracking multiple schedules via spreadsheets or emails and putting that information into the calendar yourself.

Here’s how you can use a shared calendar to delegate tasks and scheduling. It’s more efficient for everyone.

Use designated sub-calendars

To make delegating easy, set up sub-calendars designated for departments, groups, or individuals. In a family scenario, you would create a calendar for each member of the family. Color-coding makes it easy to spot who’s been assigned a task or responsibility.

In a work scenario, you might need calendars for departments, project groups, or individual colleagues.

Delegate a task

To delegate a task to someone, simply put the task on their sub-calendar. Since you can have a task on more than one calendar, you can assign it to multiple people. You can also keep it on your own calendar. That way you won’t forget about it, and can check in on the progress.

Use the Scheduler view

The Scheduler view is helpful for moving tasks and events from one sub-calendar to another. Toggle on the calendars you want to see, then you can drag an event from one calendar to another easily. All your team members can use this feature to move completed tasks on to the next person. Here’s a demo calendar where you can try it out.

Delegate the scheduling

Many managers and coordinators find themselves juggling a whole collection of schedules. It’s tedious and time-consuming to communicate about each person’s availability, and then have to transfer that information into a calendar.

Streamline the process by letting people enter their own availability. All they have to do is create an event on their own sub-calendar: a requested day off, a meeting, open hours, scheduled client sessions, etc.

Here’s an example of a calendar used this way. You can click on the image to try a live demo:

Include all the information

Before delegating a task, make sure it includes all the information needed. Otherwise, you’ll be pulled right back into the task and your delegating won’t save you much time.

Include a detailed description, files or images, needed links, or anything else that’s relevant, like a checklist or handbook.