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.

For the June long weekend I’d planned with my Mum to pay a surprise visit to her parents who live in Trundle NSW. Where you ask? Here is Trundle, home to only a couple of hundred people and my grandparents. It took approximately 6 hours to drive there from Sydney even though it’s only around 430km. There is no mobile signal for my Optus phone once and there is no internet at my grandparents place. I volunteered to deprive myself of my technological addictions for the weekend, mostly. I also thought I’d go one step further and not drink coffee until I get back to Sydney.

Just south of Trundle is another town called Bogan Gate. Australian readers may be amused by a town named after a somewhat derogatory named social class. To my great surprise and delight Mum told me there was actually a gate which the town was named after. She elaborated that it was in the middle of a field nowhere significant. None the less I insisted that I had to get a photo on the Bogan Gate else nobody would believe it. So here it is:

Saturday evening, we’d had dinner at 6pm and by 7.15p I was yawning and musing about going to bed. Feeling very isolated I had to repeatedly tell myself that checking my phone was a pointless endeavour and to stop thinking about what conversations may be happening on Twitter, Plurk, IRC and IM. It was odd once everybody had gone to bed and I was sitting up alone at 10pm drinking tea and reading a book I’d been meaning to start for a number of weeks.

It’s very dark and quiet out there. A stark contrast to the ‘not quite night’ darkness and noise that is part of living in Newtown. The air is cold outside but the house was centrally heated, so despite bemused friends commenting about how I’d freeze on my trip west, it wasn’t the case at all.

On a Sunday daytrip I did have signal for a couple of hours and checked my email, Twitter replies and managed to catch up with a few people who were around at the time. It amazed me quite a bit how much I depend on the feeling of connectedness with people who are located both locally and all over the world. I don’t need to be talking to these people all the time, but I do feel most at ease knowing that I can. Instead I found other ways of passing the time, listening to my Mum talk to her Mum about the people who grew up and currently reside around the area. It seems that people out here are getting married and having children but doing little else. Perhaps its the rural setting, with little else to do. But it isn’t a technological black hole. The exchange in Trundle ADSL2 capable, people out there probably have a better internet connection than I do. There is no reason why somebody out there couldn’t be as active online as anybody in a capital city.

Admittedly there isn’t the same opportunity to network face to face but that shouldn’t stop you. My friend Fiona is based in Cairns and is a very active member of a number of online communities. She’s travelled to cities and met with several other people. While I’ve never actually met Fi face to face, we regularly communicate through social networks, have text conversations, call each other on mobile or Skype and send each other sms’. In other words, we’re not different to any other people who are friends and living 1600km apart.

I’ve taken some photos around Trundle, I think fondly of this place after spending a great deal of my childhood visiting here. There are a couple of heritage listed locations and Trundle also boasts the widest street in the west. The reason its so wide is that ‘back in the old days’ there needed to be sufficient room to turn the bullock-drawn wool wagons. It’s a saying here that you can tell the difference between locals and visitors by who walks and who drives from one side of the street to the other. You can see some of the larger photos from around here on my Flickr account starting from here.