[CPD23] Thing 8: Google Calendar

One of my 11 things to do in 2011 was to get into the habit of using Google Calendar to organise myself. I have an Android phone, so theoretically if I use Google Calendar as my diary, I’ll be organised and know what’s going on wherever I go!

At first I wasn't great at keeping it up-to-date, so was initially a bit hit and miss. I’ve got a trusty paper diary that lives on my desk at work, which I put everything in as it’s right there in front of me all the time at work. I found it took me a while to get into the habit of writing things down in both places, but I think I'm getting there now.

Google has made a good Calendar application that works well (despite them making it kind of ugly in it’s latest update in my opinion)

This is my calendar this month:

A bit small but you get the picture. I’ve got several different calendars on there - CPD23 (the sea of green), Cambridge Library Group, my library books feed (which I’ll come back to for the extra Thing), CCLF and courses@Cambridge. Anything I want to add which isn’t covered by these calendars is in pink, and I’ve put my colleagues’ holidays in bright yellow, and my own holidays in purple. Look at that lovely holiday coming up! As Becky points out, since their recent update there is less space in the full month view for your events, and so they tend to get reduced down to "+3 more", which is quite annoying. I prefer to see the whole month at once, so I might unsubscribe from a couple of extra calendars I added to clear space for my own events.

What I like the most about Google calendar is that it syncs to my phone, and when I have an event coming up it can give me an alarm on my phone if I want. If it’s something I really can’t miss, I can set up multiple alarms and email alerts weeks, days, hours and minutes before the event. I'm generally quite a punctual/reliable person, but I do like to have reminders for the important stuff.