How to set up a daily agenda with Google Calendar

How can you have a daily agenda from your Google Calendar?

If you are like me, your Google calendar acts as a central nervous system for your daily schedule and weekly schedule. At a minimum, it contains the meetings and key events that you need to perform to be effective at work.

For many years I would start my morning off by looking at my Google Calendar to see what was on my agenda for the day. I would review the events and chat about it with my wife while drinking coffee before my young children would wake up and demand our attention.

Finally, one day I decided to explore and see if I could receive a daily agenda email that outlined my meetings for the day. It seemed like this was an obvious feature that should be baked directly into Google Calendar.

It turns out that this exists! In the rest of this post, I'm going to share how you can configure your daily agenda with your calendar events, but I'm also going to outline the problems I ran into with the default options.

Towards the end of this post, I'm going to show you how our daily planner and calendar software solves these problems and helps you stay focused, on track, and know exactly what you need to accomplish every day.

How to Set Up the Daily Agenda for Google Calendar

Setting up the default daily agenda email takes a few minutes. In short, you need to visit Google Calendar and find the settings option for a particular calendar. I've included a screenshot below of the settings option:

Then, you need to find the "other notifications" setting under the calendar option. At the bottom, you should have the option to set up a daily agenda email and notification.

After you click to enable the email, you will receive a daily agenda email at 5am in the morning. Why 5am? Well, that's because Google thought it would be a good idea (or they were copying Outlook's agenda functionality).

It looks something like this:

When I first discovered this, I was excited, but it felt like it was missing some configuration options.

Problems with the daily agenda Google Calendar settings

The google calendar agenda email offered so much promise, but it became clear that Google didn't spend a lot of time improving this feature. I've included problems that I ran into below:

• I was not able to connect multiple calendars. I wanted to see my work and personal meetings in one email in the morning. This wasn't possible.
• The daily agenda email. While it displayed the meetings, the formatting was terrible and wasn't easy to read.
• My daily agenda is more than meetings - It was great to see my meetings, but what I really wanted was the ability to see all my work for the day. I wanted to see task list, meetings, and maybe a quick snapshot of today's weather in one place.