Just like any habit, it takes lots of cues and weeks of reinforcement to break the cycle of ( as our friend David Grady put it) 'Mindless Accept Syndrome'. Of course, it will take a lot more than one feature change to reclaim work-life balance, but it's these kinds of nudges that make real shifts in human behavior.

By enforcing working hours as a guidepost for appropriate scheduling etiquette - and by making schedulers aware that they're going outside of what's 'normal' - we may see some big shifts in how people think about scheduling events on your calendar in the future. With remote work and always-on culture becoming more and more prominent staples in our existence, and with the length and frequency of meetings increasing at a higher and higher rate each year, the temptation to schedule and accept meetings outside of normal work hours has similarly increased. This has big implications for how we think about work-life balance. Google is reinforcing the 40-hour workweek It's no longer a thing your coworker obsessed with the latest Google Calendar hacks does to defend their time, it's something that applies to everybody who wants to use it. In other words, by making it the norm and not the exception, Google has basically codified Working Hours as a requirement for scheduling meetings responsibly. Probably the biggest shift that Google made here was to make Working Hours a default setting for all users, which pushes it toward becoming immediately more prominent when you schedule a meeting. Further, because it was an optional feature, schedulers viewed compliance with it as optional: they'd routinely schedule time that went outside of your working hours and expect you to show up. Because it was buried in the Settings page of Google Calendar, and because it was off by default, it was potentially a feature that was going unused by many. In the past, Working Hours was a feature that largely went ignored by calendar users and schedulers alike. Working Hours, if you're unfamiliar with the feature, assumes a timeframe where you're able to accept and attend meetings and warns schedulers if they create a meeting outside of those hours. What this means is that you should very soon (if you haven't already) receive a notification in Google Calendar asking you to set your working hours along with a guess that Google makes as to what those working hours are. The updates to the Working Hours feature include: - Working hours now show in grid view: When you schedule a meeting with other Calendar users, their working hours will be shown in the calendar grid - Warning note for event creators: If you try to schedule an event outside the working hours of one more or guests, you’ll now see an “Outside working hours” notification - Working hours is ON by default: Working hours will now be turned on for all users by default. In September, Google announced a slew of changes to GSuite with a 'Featured Launch' highlighted at the top: We’re revamping the feature in Google Calendar that helps you let colleagues know when it’s best to work with you. Google just made a small change that is going to have a big impact on how people manage their calendars and their time.

Officetime google calendar version