2 Tech Tricks for Your Belly Dance Business
I have many times said that I spend an awful lot of time at my computer considering my business is bellydancing! As things get increasingly digitized and globalized, the computer and internet have become more and more embedded in my day-to-day business. I can’t remember the last time I used a music CD for a show. Even teaching isn’t always in person anymore with the advent of online lessons. Private party clients sign and return contracts and deposits without ever leaving their keyboard.
Recently, I’ve found two tricks for Google Calendar that have helped me – I hope you find them useful too.
Managing Scheduling For Different Time-Zones
Since I’ve started doing online private lessons, I have had to figure out scheduling for different time zones. This is complicated by the fact that I like in Arizona, which does not observe daylight savings time. I used to use a converter site or a phone app (I never did find one I really liked) but now I don’t have to because Google Calendar can take care of it – you just have to do a little setup one time.
1. Go to the gear icon in the upper right corner of Google Calendar and select “Labs” from the drop down menu.
2. Scroll down to the “World Clock” and click “enable”.
3. Now when you want to schedule something, you enter the time and can select a different time zone if needed. For example, when my student in North Dakota wants a 4:30 pm lesson, I put 4:30 pm as the appointment time and select Central Time. Google enters the appointment on my calendar for 2:30 pm Arizona time. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this function!
Keeping Gig Contracts Handy
The second trick I learned was that you can attach documents to calendar events. I find this very useful with gig contracts since I create and store all mine on Google Drive. I attach them to the event in my calendar so I can very handily review the details a day or two before as I’m making final preparations for the job.
1. Go to the gear icon in the upper right corner of Google Calendar and select “Labs” from the drop down menu.
2. Scroll down to the “Event Attachments” and click “enable”.
3. You will now have an “Add Attachment” link below the description box when you create a new event.
At the time of this post, you unfortunately cannot view the attachments on your phone. Get on that, Google! I don’t know if it works on tablets – if you try it tell us in the comments below. I still find this feature insanely useful.