Google Calendar is nice—till you’re caught clicking endlessly to get the place you want. I didn’t notice a easy shortcut might velocity up the whole lot, however now I exploit it continuously.
There is a Faster Solution to Fast Add Occasions
It takes three clicks to create a brand new Google Calendar occasion, and that is when the web site is loaded in your browser. In the event you’ve obtained a bookmark to your Google Calendar, that is a complete of 4 clicks and all of the ready in between earlier than you can begin including in particulars for an occasion.
Yadullah Abidi MakeUseOf
cal.new bypasses all of that. Once you kind cal.new (or its twin assembly.new) in your browser’s URL bar and hit enter, you land straight on the web page for composing a brand new occasion. No intermediate clicks, no ready for half-hidden buttons to look—only a clean kind prepared in your title, date, time, and outline. Mixed with different Google Calendar hacks to spice up your productiveness, cal.new is the icing on the cake you want.
Google treats cal.new as a direct shortcut to the identical editor behind the “Create” button in Google Calendar, that means you get the identical options you usually would. You possibly can add Google Meet hyperlinks, assign reminders, invite visitors, select a calendar coloration, and extra. For anybody who schedules conferences or occasions a number of occasions a day, these saved clicks find yourself saving numerous time.
Easy methods to Use cal.new to Its Full Potential
Merely realizing about cal.new may be handy, however the shortcut is much more helpful. There are all kinds of various additions you may make to the command to get extra performance out of it.
For starters, cal.new may be built-in with system shortcuts. This implies you’ll be able to create world hotkeys on Home windows utilizing instruments like AutoHotkey or a Fast Motion in macOS. This fashion, you’ll be able to create new occasions on the click on of a button. It additionally works with the Stream Deck in the event you’ve obtained one.
In the event you use a number of Google accounts in the identical browser—say one for work and one for private use—you’ll be able to goal the shortcut to a particular account by including a slash and a quantity. For instance, typing cal.new/2 opens the occasion window together with your second signed-in account.
It’d take a couple of minutes to determine which account is positioned at which quantity. Nevertheless, when you do, this takes away the additional clicks wanted to change your Google account when creating calendar occasions. You additionally will not be creating private occasions in your work calendar and vice versa.
One other, barely extra superior technique you should use to create calendar occasions quicker is modifying the URL after it hundreds. cal.new does not settle for question parameters within the URL string by itself, however the underlying occasion editor does. As soon as the occasion hundreds, you’ll be able to add particulars within the following format:
https://calendar.google.com/calendar/r/eventedit?textual content=Occasion+Identify &dates=20250810T090000Z/20250810T100000Z&location=Location+Goes+Right here&particulars=What+You+Need+To+Talk about
Press Enter when you’re carried out, and the shape will refresh with all particulars of their related fields. This is usually a little onerous to wrap your head round at first, particularly the date and time format. You need to use the plus (+) signal to append phrases for all fields.
For specifying the date and time, Google Calendar makes use of a YYYYMMDDTHHMMSSZ format. This may be damaged down as:
Parameter
Description
YYYY
Yr
MM
Month between 1 and 12
DD
Day of the month between 01 and 31
T
Separates the date from time
HHMMSS
Time in 24-hour format
Z
UTC timezone indicator
In accordance with this format, the aforementioned URL will create an occasion between 9 AM to 10 AM UTC on August 10, 2025. Google Calendar will mechanically convert the time zone laid out in UTC to your native time zone. Time may be complicated in Google Calendar, particularly in the event you’re attempting to get probably the most out of Time Insights.
As soon as you’ve got gotten the grasp of those three strategies, you can create Google Calendar occasions on the press of a button, utilizing the Google account of your selection, and add occasion particulars with out having to click on by a complete kind. And in the event you assume that is all cal.new can do, wait till you see what the extra superior makes use of for this shortcut can do.
Superior Makes use of for cal.new
By combining cal.new with the parameterized Google Calendar URL, you’ll be able to create some fairly helpful automations. Relying in your CRM or project-management device, you’ll be able to create a “Schedule” hyperlink that may create particular person occasions with information populated from a job on the click on of a button.
In the event you choose working in a terminal, life can get even easier. A easy terminal script can set off cal.new adopted by a particular Google Calendar URL, and you’ll have occasions scheduled in your calendar with out ever leaving the terminal.
Automation platforms like Zapier or IFTTT also can use cal.new to set off new occasions when particular situations are met. As a substitute of utilizing the extra difficult Google Calendar API, you’ll be able to configure a webhook to ship a GET request to your cal.new URL at any time when an occasion happens, equivalent to a brand new Trello card or help ticket in Zendesk.
To be clear, cal.new does not supply the identical quantity of flexibility as the complete Google Calendar API. That stated, it’s miles easier to make use of and does not require you to be a software program wizard simply to automate some Google Calendar conferences.
The great thing about cal.new is its versatility. It may be used for something so simple as a guide shortcut to rapidly create a gathering or as a part of an extended end-to-end automation system that triggers when a particular situation is met. In any case, it saves you clicks, and so they add up in the long term.
