Connect Claude to Your Google Calendar

Welcome back. If you finished the Notion track, your email is already triaging itself every morning before you wake up. If you skipped ahead and landed here first, that's fine too, because this one stands on its own. Here's the thing. By the end of these episodes, you're going to walk into every single morning with your whole day already laid out in front of you. Email, meetings, what needs prep, what has conflicts. All of it is going to be in one place, and it's all going to be done before you wake up. But Claude can't read a calendar that it can't see. So job one is the introduction. Today we're going to connect Google Calendar. It takes about two minutes, and I'm going to do every click live on my real account so you can follow along on yours. You can see that I'm in the Cowork tab. Here I'm going to go to Customize, where we see our skills, and then we're going to go over to our connectors. This should start to look familiar. This is something we're going to come back to more than once, and I hope it's something you're starting to get used to. Now, just like we did for Gmail, Notion, and Claude in Chrome, we're going to make that introduction to Google Calendar. I keep using the word introduction, and I really do mean it's like being introduced. As we begin to think of this as a virtual assistant, we need to think of connectors like introductions we would make. Think about being in the office, or online, where we would connect people to tools, introduce them to processes, introduce them to our software stack. Now we're going to introduce this to Google. We come over here and say we want to connect to Google Calendar. We can see this one manages our calendar effortlessly and it's developed by Google. This is one of the official plugins that comes from Google, so it's something I'm going to trust a little bit more than if it came from somewhere else. It's one of our official connectors, and I'm going to go ahead and click Connect. It says complete the steps, and it opened a browser window for me to continue with Google. I'm going to do that and connect it to my jdstraughan account. I'm not going to show the password. I like all of you, but I think that would be just a little too much. It says you're signing back into Claude. I'll say OK. It asks, do you want the website to open Claude? Allow. It brings me back into Claude for desktop. If I go to connectors now, we see that Google Calendar is in the list, but for some reason it didn't connect. OK, so it needed me to sign back into Claude in the browser, and now it's asking me to choose an account. I'm going to choose my jdstraughan account. It asks, do you want Claude for Google Calendar? It will allow Google Calendar to get my email address, and I say yes. Then it asks what I want Claude for Google Calendar to access. I'm going to say I want it to view my calendars, see and download any calendar I can access using Google Calendar, and see, edit, share, and permanently delete all the calendars I can access using Google Calendar. You might want to turn that last one off if you don't feel comfortable. I'm fine with it, and I'll show you why: it's an official connector, and we're not going to give Claude the ability to delete things in practice, even though the grand set of permissions we're granting would allow it. If you want view-only access, that's perfectly fine. You can leave that unchecked, and everything we show you in this track will still work, other than being able to place temporary holds on the calendar (which may come in future episodes) or create and edit events. So check or uncheck it as you like. I'm leaving it checked. You're welcome not to. It asks if I want to go back to the Claude desktop app, and I do. Now when we come back into our connectors, we see Google Calendar has the status of Connected, and we have access to our Google Calendar. OK, let's prove that we're connected, because I don't just believe in check marks and neither should you. I'm going to open a new chat, and in that chat I'm going to type: what's on my calendar tomorrow? Let's have it go connect to our calendar and see what's there. It says tomorrow I've got three meetings: R.C. Buford, Jason Dady, and a Trusted Advisors group. A pretty tight morning with two meetings back to back, then a long block in the afternoon. So it can see my calendar tomorrow. Those are not my real meetings, by the way. I'm just having fun and putting some names in there from the San Antonio community. And that means we are connected. While it does feel kind of magical to be able to chat with my calendar, I can take it a step further and ask: do I have any conflicts this week? Submit that, and it goes off to see if it finds any conflicts on my calendar. It can look ahead, see what's out there, and find any places where it can step in and be helpful. And it says we do. Wednesday this week I have an overlapping meeting between David Robinson and Charles Barkley. That could get a little interesting. Those overlap for 30 minutes, and maybe that's something I could use Cowork to fix. So it's doing what it says it's doing. It's not just keyword matching. It's reading the events, understanding times, comparing them, and telling me I've got a double booking. My calendar app has been looking at that same double booking for a week, potentially, and it wasn't going to say anything. My virtual assistant saw it in one question. We're going to wire this up in the future to work just like our email, so I get that triage report, and that's really going to be the game changer as we move forward. And really, this is the whole episode: one connection and those two prompts. But from this we're going to be able to start skill stacking. We're going to build things on top of it. Before you go, remember that connectors live in Customize, under Connectors. That's where we go to do things like connect our Google Calendar, and where we'll continue to add things. We can now communicate with our calendar in plain English, just like we did here, and it's going to increase our ability to have amazing daily briefings once we tie our calendar and our email together. Now, if you're an Outlook person, a Microsoft 365 person, the next episode in this track is for you. It's the same introduction, except instead of Google we're going to do this on the Microsoft side, and I'll show you exactly what to do to get all set up. So if you're all Google, skip straight to the episode after next, episode three of this track. For everybody else, if you want to see how we do this on the Microsoft side, hang on for the next episode, and we'll start doing the same things we did here. Stop listing meetings and start reading your week the way a chief of staff would, including finding your conflicts. We'll see you over there.