Delegation for everyone

Executive assistants

EAs and the people they support are the main beneficiaries of delegation. They are the reason why Google Workspace compartmentalizes delegation - working with many partners at once requires clean, sharp tools.

Executives typically delegate their calendar to EAs. Depending on the level of trust, workload and the executive's fluency in technology and personal information management, they will also delegate their mail and contacts.

Executive assistants usually keep Calendars open all day - often, they open several tabs and load different calendar layers for the people they work with.

Being out on vacation

When you are out on vacation and want someone to keep an eye on critical communication, you can delegate access to Gmail to someone from your team. You can agree that replies should not be sent from your account - but this might vacations less stressful for you, your team and your client.

Be sure you are not disclosing confidential material this way.

Interns and temps

I know customers who re-utilize the accounts for interns - being the third incarnation of intern_42@company.com would make me feel mixed feelings and remind me of the Matrix. But they must have their reasons.

Perhaps another way to supervise interns would be to have them delegate their inbox to supervisors - where permitted, of course.

Coaching

Coaching conversations might benefit from shared access, even if temporary. If you share your calendar, your coach might help you diagnose your workload over a month and give you tips on how to spend your time better.

Team calendars

Create a secondary calendar for your team so everyone can add reminders, deadlines, out-of-office days and anything else that glues you together. Remember that secondary calendars do not impact primary calendars (they are separate layers), so continue to use your normal calendar for meeting invitations.

Teaming up outside work

Many families already use shared calendars for family duties. Perhaps you care jointly for kids (or elderly relatives) and need to be aware of their agenda. All of that is Calendar delegation - and when you delegate your private calendar to your work account, you increase control and flexibility without exposing that data to your colleagues. Your colleagues only see your primary calendar, after all.

Bring your private world to your work world

You can delegate your private Gmail calendar to your work account. That will make it easier to manage both - without revealing the contents of your private life to your colleagues. Note that the inverse is not possible.

Share your contacts with your team

Google Workspace automatically shares company-internal contacts (the directory) - no need to share, everyone's got those. But it also creates contacts when you email a new contact.

Depending on your work and your team, it might make sense to share your contacts with them.