Google Calendar SMS Interaction

September 7, 2006

Google Calendar allows you to use SMS, to remotely interact with your calendar.

This is extremely handy for when you are away from the computer, and/or an internet connection, and you need to either check your events for the day, or add future events for another day.

Phone image

If you use text messages a lot on your mobile phone, you can easily interact with you calendar:

  • Check today's events.
  • Check tomorrow's events.
  • Check your next scheduled event.
  • Add events for any day on your calendar.

Setup

In order to enable SMS interaction with your Google Calendar, you first have to set up your mobile phone number in your Calendar settings, under the Notifications tab.

How it's done

To check today's events, simply send "day" as a text message to the Google Calendar SMS number (48368). In mere seconds, you'll receive a return text message, listing your events for today.

To check tomorrow's events, send "nday."

To check your next scheduled event, send "next."

To add events to your calendar, you can send the subject, start time, end time, and date - and it will all be converted to an event on your calendar.

Here is an example text message that adds an event for today at 7 PM:

Watch NFL opener with Pat 7-10 PM

This will automatically add the event for today, and span it from 7 to 10 PM.

Here's another:

Go to bank to reorder checks 9/8/06 11 AM

This will create an event for 9/8/06 (tomorrow), at 11 AM, titled, "Go to bank to reorder checks."

This is great, because we can specify any date for the event, by simply typing it in.

But what if we don't want to recall the date, and would rather reference the date with "tomorrow," which is more intuitive? We can do that too.

The last example would turn into this:

Go to bank to reorder checks tomorrow 11 AM

The keyword in this text message is tomorrow. Google recognizes that keyword, and uses it to create the event for tomorrow, rather than today.

How about next week?

Happy hour for work next Friday 5 PM

You guessed it. This automatically creates an event for next Friday at 5 PM.

Without having to figure out the exact day of the month, this form of "intuitive scheduling" is very helpful.

Drawbacks

There are a couple of things to be aware of.

If you don't specify a time, it uses the exact minute you sent it, and extends it for one hour, so try to specify a time in your text message.

Also, this only works for events on your Primary calendar, which I believe is a major drawback. I have about six different calendars - one for General, Work, Sports, etc - and I can only have this functionality on my "General" calendar.

Related

Comments/Mentions