Google Calendar update: Now, know how much time you spent in meetings

Google Calendar update: Managing time has become almost impossible ever since the Covid-19 pandemic blurred the line between work and home. While tech companies have rolled out tools to make working from home and disconnecting from our smartphones easier, none have given us a reality check of how much time an employee spends in meetings and how to manage those daily meetings better, up until now. “We’ll also be delivering Time Insights to Google Workspace users (visible to the employee only, not their manager), so that employees can assess how they're spending their time against their own priorities,” Google had said at the time. Enter: Google Calendar.

Google, back in March this year, had promised to roll out an update to Google Calendar that would help Google Workspace users manage their time in meetings better. The company had promised to achieve this via a feature called Time Insights, which would ‘help employees assess how they were spending their time against their own priorities.’ Now, months later, Google kept its word and rolled out Time Insights on Google Calendar to all Workspace users.

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Google Calendar Time Insight feature, as the company explains, will provide “a personalized, analytical experience on the web, to see how your time is spent across meetings and collaborators.” A screenshot of the feature shared by the company gives us a glimpse of the kind of insights that the feature will share with the users. On the top, there is a ‘Time Breakdown’ pie chart, which shows how much of a user’s working hours are spent in meetings, which is then divided further into meetings with one person vs meetings with larger groups. It also shows weekly insights as well as the highlights of which are the busiest days of a week.

Google Calendar Time Insights are visible just to the concerned employees and not their managers. But Google in an update on its support page wrote that “if you manage other people’s calendars and have “manage sharing access” permission to those calendars, you can view their Time Insights.”