So here is a new development.
A few days ago, one of the people I work with called me in fit of confusion. She said, “I don’t understand this. I’ve set up this webinar with GotoMeeting and it does everything that it’s supposed to do. But how come I keep getting this event double booked on my calendar?”
Fast forward to today when my smartphone buzzed me. When I looked at the notification, it was telling me that I had a webinar I was going to attend in 15 minutes, one I didn’t remember scheduling. Yet when I opened the appropriate calendar, the one associated with all of my social media stuff, there was the webinar big as life itself.
And I did remember intentionally ignoring this particular event. I wasn’t planning to attend because I had another event scheduled for that time.
It looks like in a recent update, Google provided us with the option to automatically schedule events on our friends calendar when we email them.
Sounds like a real convenience. If one of your friends sends you an event invitation, Google will add it to your calendar automatically with no intervention on your part.
However, if you are like me, you have all sorts of people sending you event invitations to webinars, seminars and online events. You won’t have time to attend them all. Heck, there will be some you won’t even want to respond to. But Google will insert them into your calendar all the same, making a cluttered mess of everything.
Control Your Calendar by Not Automatically Adding Invitations
You can turn this off simply by going into your calendar settings and finding the “Automatically add invitations to my calendar” setting. Looks like it defaults to “yes” but there are two other options available to you.
- Yes, but don’t send event reminders unless I have responded yes or maybe.
- No.
My recommendation is to set it to No. You’ll want to control who has access to your calendar. And having this switch to “Yes” allows anyone to drop events into your daily routine.
Now don’t get me wrong. This can be a real convenience if you have a controlled and limited list of people sending you invitations.
However, if you don’t, you have every pitchman this side of the Mississippi dropping events on your calendar merely by sending you an email.
Control Your Calendar. Set this switch to “No”.
