Alison Young

Who doesn’t love a calendar? They’ve been hanging on our walls for years and now they’re in our phones, laptops and websites. Never before have I been able to be so very accountable of my time. My calendar is very indicative of the sort of lifestyle I lead, where I travel to and how often, even how much in advance I plan things.

There are any number of calendar applications which suit various peoples needs and lifestyles. My calendar of choice is Google Calendar for reasons of flexibility, expansion and accessibility. Please feel free to comment with the calendars you use and why you love them. The things I love about Gcal may or may not be able to be done on something else better, who knows. This isn’t a Gcal push post, it’s a calendar love post.

So what calendars do you have?

I have a few calendars which I have feeding into my central calendar repository. I have my personal, health, rent and work calendars that I update. I also have subscriptions to my Facebook events, Sydney Linux User Group and selected friends calendars. Sharing of calendars among friends can be very useful if you all have very busy schedules but like to catch up often. When being a social organiser as I often find myself doing it’s wonderful to know at a glance who is free on what days.

There are quite a number of calendars I have for good reason, all are important and useful t me but I don’t need to see all of them all of the time. The thing I love is the ability to select which calendars I have in the current view. I only need to see the rent calendar once a week for approximately 30seconds to know who, if anybody, I need to be chasing for rent that week and who’s paid up for the next few weeks.

Wait, did you say health?

This was only a recent idea of mine to create a health calendar for myself. You know those ideas that as soon as you have them and then start to create and use it you wonder why you didn’t do it years ago? This is one of those.

In my years of moving around Brisbane and then to Sydney and in the age of doctors that are increasingly apathetic I’ve had some difficulty finding one that I like. Hence why it’s been quite rare for me to return to the same doctor or even practice. My medical history records kept on the other end are spread far and wide. It made more sense to me to keep a record of my medical history on my end which I can give to a doctor quickly and easily if needed.

The sorts of ways this can be useful is amazingly broad. Been struck down by the flu this year, how about keeping track of the number of days. Even better, you can remind yourself t get a flu shot next year. It’s not unusual for me to suffer from 2-3 throat infection during winter at various stages. This is a useful way to keep track of when I got them and how long they stuck around for. I can detail the doctors I have seen and for what. How about all those times you’ve been on a course of antibiotics an forgotten to take them on time. Using a calendar you can set yourself reminders. GCal can even send your reminders as sms so no matter where you are, provided you have your phone you’ll get the message. As a woman there are some evil but necessary things it’s useful to keep a track of and set reminders for. Similar sort of things apply to you men as well. No more excuses.

The more I use it the more I can see the value of a health calendar. It’s totally private and most likely more secure than any medical records kept anywhere else. The more I think about it the more it makes sense.

I don’t think it’s unusual for people to have a number of calendars. I daresay most would be in a similar position to myself. Maybe not all the same but there are no shortage of ideas for things that you want a separate calendar for.

Why I love Google Calendar

So I may have changed my mind and am going to pimp GCal a bit here. I love a few things about it which may inspire you to use a calendar, whether GCal or not, find tha suits your needs. The big things I love about it are:

• ease of use, stupidly easy to create new calendars and only a little more difficult to subscribe to calendars. Drag and type to add events and there’s an additional screen to add more details, reminders and invite others.
• Reminders. I love the reminders so much I should have listed them first. I can set notification, email or sms reminders from anywhere to 5mins to weeks. The best part of the sms reminders is that GCal was written for the US to use where over there they pay to receive sms messages. Here in Australia we don’t pay but GCal still sends them to us. So many Aussies don’t realise we can use the sms reminder service. We can, so do! I often set an sms reminder between 1-2hrs before an event and it has saved me a number of times. Especially if you put address or phone number details in the field that’s sent. Perfect example is the Girl Geek Dinner I’m attending tonight. I had it in my mind that it was at number 70 but in fact it’s 51. There’s a potentially big dilemma avoided.
• Sharing and subscribing. I found this wonderful little application named FBCal that lets me share my facebook events with my GCal, more often than not I wind up putting those events in my personal calendar but it saves so much time avoiding having to flick backwards and forwards through tabs to copy details. It’s also simple for me to share my calendar with frinds who depending on my settings default settings and also for each event can see either the details of my events and appointments or only that I’m unavailable or free at a certain date and time.
• Flexibility. I can access my GCal from either of my laptops, I can view appointments from my phone and I can receive reminders to anywhere. The only caveat to this incredible flexibility is that I need an internet or data connection in order to access the calendars however if this isn’t possible then the sms reminders pick up any slack for me.

I like being organised, often I have to budget my time as carefully as I budget my finances, I also don’t like to disappoint people and try to make sure that I have adequate time for myself, work and socialising. I’m very fortunate in that at present my work hours are very flexible so that if needed I can work during the night, on weekends and from anywhere I have an internet connection. This leaves my time very open to events and also travel which can happen on very short notice or be planned months in advance.

My life is great fun and I’d like it to stay that way for a while yet. Planning and scheduling is often I do well naturally but sometimes it’s good to have calendars to pick up where I may forget things. Don’t forget the other basic things that everybody uses calendars for, remembering birthdays, anniversaries, holidays.

Have fun with your calendars and find the one, or selection of many, that works best for you.