Planning a family reunion with Google Workspace

After the pandemic, many people rethought the idea of spending time as a family and maybe because of the quarantine, any moment became perfect for a barbecue: a long weekend, some good weather, or just a good day in general. Besides, as we know, for years, a barbecue has been our simple way to get our loved ones together.

But once again and thanks to the sanitary emergency, we had a very strong approach to technologies and what used to be solved by sending a couple of invitations with a suggested date and time to arrange the family barbecue has become outdated and frustrating.

That’s why it became necessary to implement a tool to plan family gatherings in an easier and more organized way. In fact, there are someGoogle apps that are very useful to add some coordination to your barbecues and keep track of plans and many of your family’s memories using some of your favorite apps in Google Workspace.

So, here’s how to do it when you’re planning your own family barbecue or reunion picnic.

Kick off your planning with Google Calendar

Okay, as you’ll know, the most important part in this kind of reunion is the family and if you’re responsible for inviting them, you’d better do it early, even though you might not have all the details finalized.

Fortunately, Calendar lets you send modifiable invitations. Then, if you decide to hold the picnic in your aunt’s backyard instead of the park, you can easily change the location in the invite and send an email update to guests.

Likewise, Calendar helps you remember events and things on your to-do list through notifications and Google Tasks and if you don’t know how to use both features, you can check it out in the Organize Your Day with Google Calendar and Create Task in Calendar lessons.

You see, those quick guides will teach you how to customize notifications that only alerted you about an event when it was most helpful for you or about calendar entries called Tasks (that you can use to prompt yourself to remember small things like “pick up groceries for the family reunion.”) among others.

Use folders in Google Drive to organize your memories and documents

Once you’ve scheduled everything, you’ll want a place to store your important documents and memories, won’t you? Well, what better tool than Google Drive that offers you a place to keep all of your family reunion files, and a way to organize them through folders, subfolders and color coding.

Certainly, it is an app that has thousands of options, but there is also a quick guide that you can check to learn what you need to know. That way, you can create a system that collects everyone’s contact information using Google Sheets, as well as create general folders for your barbecues or events that you can share with your family.

Create Subfolders

On the other hand, you will also have the ability to create subfolders, highlight or classify photos by color, where you can include receipts of recipe orders, nostalgic videos, or even photos of your grandpa in his childhood! all in the same place.

Once you’re done, you’ll find that your Drive folder will look like a digital photo album, which you can refer to whenever you miss the family.

Use Gmail to stay in touch

Obviously, to make all this possible, you must send the information to your relatives and Gmail can help you keep up with all your communication. Actually, there’s a lesson you can read on to learn how to label and look up emails so you can keep up with it all: the Communicate Using Email will teach you everything.

With labels, you can tag emails and they will be organized into folders where you can easily find them later. You can also search for an email by subject line, contact name or even a keyword which is very useful when you’re looking for all those pesky order confirmations. 

Lastly, when the reunion is over, you will be able to file everything in the mail. Then, it does not fill up your inbox. However, you will still have access to these files in the “All Mail” folder if you need to see them again for future events.

Final thoughts

We are going through an era that is constantly changing, and although we often think that change is exhausting and difficult, Google has made this transition a little easier for us with its Applied Digital Skills lessons.

It is partly thanks to this initiative that many users have learned to get the most out of Google Workspace applications even if they are not working environments. 

We hope this note will encourage you to try out your favorite Google apps in ways you never thought possible, because basically, this has become the primary way to digitally record our growing family interactions.

Finally, if you want to learn even more about Calendar, Drive, and Gmail, check out the quick guides in the Google Workspace collection for beginners.