Creating calendar events through a spreadsheet

If you've read some of my recent weeknotes you will have seen that I wanted to take advantage of the 'reset' I am having returning to work after my maternity leave. One of the big things I wanted to achieve was to streamline some of my admin. The first of which was to manage my availability.

Here's what I did...

Adapting and building on Tom Watson's scheduling tool

I took a tool that was designed on Airtable by Tom to manage his freelance work and availability. The tool is great, but with finances a bit tight I thought I would attempt to recreate a version of it in my Google Workspace.

You can also see a brilliant collection of resources he's developed here.

Building the sheet

I wanted to create a sheet that showed the relationships between clients and projects, and that I might ultimately also be able to use to manage my invoicing and to see the average number of projects that I work on for each client - I have in the past had a lot of return work so that's always interesting to see.

Getting help from Gemini

As a non coder with some understanding what needs to be done I find Gemini (other AI tools are available) quite helpful in the troubleshooting of things. It can be quite frustrating when you know that there's an opportunity to do something but aren't quite sure how to get it done, Gemini is a really useful tool in this situation... Here's the chat I had to debug my code.

Making it available for you to adjust and use

I am passionate about reducing digital waste, and the waste of time that creating new things brings, so I've embedded a public template below for you to access and use. Make a copy and the app script should come too :)

The sheet has three tabs, Availability, Clients, and Projects. The Availability tab is the part that powers the event creation, you'll need to add your google calendar ID to Cell H2 for it to work.

Other use case ideas

A long with saving myself from potentially double booking, this could be used as the basis of a room booking tool for small organisations, or to help manage volunteers, or support sessions with beneficiaries. I'm sure there's plenty of other use cases too!