Google Calendar Daily / Weekly Agenda to Your Inbox

Google Calendar has a handy feature to send a daily agenda to your inbox at 5 am. By turning this option in Settings for my calendars > General notifications > Daily agenda, you receive an email with visualized schedules before your day begins.

This article, however, focuses on broader use cases. For instance, some people prefer receiving the agenda email at a different time; Or you'd like to exclude certain calendars; Or send weekly agenda to yourself and your team. Google calendar doesn't provide such feature.

I will show you how Foresight, a code-free automation building tool, to further tweak the agenda email reminder feature and unleash your productivity. If you have yet to use Foresight, check out this quick start.

Configurable Google Calendar Daily Agenda to your inbox

Let's start with a scenario. Instead of receiving the email notification at 5am, we change it to 9pm the night before. We also pick calendars to be included in the daily agenda. Now hop on Foresight to automate the process.

1. In the Rules page, click to create a new rule.
2. Select the Recurring times trigger.
   
3. Edit the Recurring times trigger.
   
   1. In the Start time, select a date and time to start sending the agenda. Here we put Dec 2, 2019 9pm.
   2. Select Repeat every 1 day. In this example, the automation rule will run at 9pm daily starting from Dec 2, 2019.
   3. In the Ends option, choose how the recurring times trigger will end. By default, it Never ends. Alternatively, the trigger could end On a certain date or After a certain number of occurrences.
4. Click NEXT.
5. Select a Get calendar agenda action
6. Edit the Get calendar agenda action.
   
   1. Grant permission for Foresight to access your Google Calendar by clicking the Sign in with Google button.
   2. In How many days option, input 1 day. This option configures the number of days for a single agenda retrieval. It's like asking a common question What's the weather like in the next 3 days?
   3. In the Include days of week option, select the days that matter to you. Events at unselected days will be ignored.
   4. Select all your calendars of interest in the Calendars option.
      
      Reminders, Tasks and Appointment Slots will NOT be included in the agenda.
   5. Click ADD NEXT ACTION.
7. Select Email action.
   
8. Configure the Email action.
   
   1. Grant permission to send emails from your Gmail by clicking Sign in with Google button.
   2. In the To option, input your email. You will literally receive the daily agenda emails at night from another you. Spooky...
   3. Input anything in the email Subject.
   4. (Optional) input extra recipients to the CC or BCC options (hidden from the screenshot above).
   5. Type whatever in the Email Body. Then in a proper paragraph, insert the Calendar Agenda variable. Type {{ to pop up the variable selection dropdown menu and select Calendar Agenda. After selection, the email body displays the variable like {{ htmlAgenda_xxxxxx }}, where xxxxxx is a dynamic generated id unique to each rule.
      
   6. Click REVIEW.
9. Give a name for the rule.
10. Click CREATE.
11. You will see a card for the newly created rule.
    
12. That's all for setting up the automation. See? No coding required.
13. Verify your daily agenda email.
    
    Time zones of all calendars will be adjusted to your calendar timezone settings.
    

Google Calendar Weekly Agenda email to you and team

Apart from daily agenda emails, how about sending weekly agenda emails to yourself and your team? In corporate environment, you share group calendars with a number of co-workers. To have your team members synced, it's beneficial to send a weekly summary based on upcoming group calendar events on Monday morning.

Demo video

Consider this scenario. The team share a group calendar Project Elk Development Timeline. The team organizer is responsible to send out the agenda every Monday to the team members notifying meetings and deadlines.

Instructions

Configuring automation for weekly agenda on Foresight is not much different from configuring daily agenda demonstrated above. I will skip some screenshots for simplicity.

1. In the Rules page, click to create a new rule.
2. Select the Recurring times trigger.
3. Edit the Recurring times trigger. Input the Start time as when the first weekly agenda would be sent. Set Repeat every 1 week.
   
4. Click NEXT.
5. Select a Get calendar agenda action.
6. Configure the Get calendar agenda action.
   
   1. Grant permission to access your Google calendar by clicking the Sign in with Google button.
   2. Input 5 days to the How many days option. It's a time window from the Start time Monday 5 am to Saturday 5 am.
   3. In the Include days of week option, excluding Saturday and Sunday. The events won't be included in the final agenda.
   4. Select the Calendars to be included in the agenda. Adding all calendars is definitely okay.
   5. Click ADD NEXT ACTION.
7. Select Email action.
8. Configure the Email action.
   
   1. Grant permission to send emails from your Gmail by clicking the Sign in with Google button.
   2. Add any user or group email to the To option. If group email, every group member will receive your weekly agenda.
   3. (Optional) Add any other persons with whom you'd like to share your agenda in the CC or BCC field.
   4. Fill in the Subject and Email Body. The variable {{ htmlAgenda_xxxxxx }}, as mentioned in the daily agenda part, will be populated with your real schedules at the rule run time.
      

FAQ

Q: Does Foresight support All day events?

Yes.

Q: Does Foresight support recurring events?

Yes. Recurring events will be expanded into individual events and ordered correctly in the schedule timeline.

Conclusion

Having a daily or weekly agenda before your work starts helps yourself and your team organized.

If you have more complicated cases, tweak the trigger and actions configuration to see if it's closer to what you wanted.

Feel free to leave any comments below to improve Foresight and add value to yourself.