Automating colours in your Google calendar

Last year, my team faced a common process challenge. Our Google calendar was a blob of yellow boxes full of client meetings and team workshops. Between client estimations, project planning, and development work, our week was packed. We'd intentionally spread client meetings to allow preparation time, but this meant constantly sifting through event names just to figure out who we were meeting.

We initially tried manually changing event colours using the built-in tool. This helped us visually identify client meetings and even track time we spent per client.

But it was tedious.

Since my coworker and I would usually name our client meetings with their name in the title, we realized we could automate this process.

That's how I found M. Wagner's post about automating the colours of the calendar. As their script did not fit exactly our purpose, I spent a nice evening making it happen within our workflow.

Now, I'm sharing our version on GitLab, which you can easily customize to fit your needs. You can change the text, the colours or add new options as you see fit by changing the following piece of code.

const var color_maping = {
  "focus time": CalendarApp.EventColor.BLUE,
  "project x": CalendarApp.EventColor.ORANGE,
  "project y": CalendarApp.EventColor.MAUVE,
  "town hall":CalendarApp.EventColor.PALE_GREEN,
};

Then here's what you’re gonna do:

1. Copy the original code from M. Wagner or use my version on GitLab
2. Put it in a new Google App Script project
3. Make adjustments as needed
4. Deploy it and assign a trigger on calendar updates.