Get Rid of Your Paper Calendar Forever

Your phone beeps and you look down at the incoming message. To your horror you realize you were supposed to be in a meeting across tow 15 minutes ago! Not going to make that meeting combine that with the fact that you just found a note about an impending project deadline jammed into a stack of post-its and you aren’t having a great week. How do you make sure this week never happens to you again? You need to get organized. You need a great calendar. I’m going to show you how to use Google calendar. It will help you get your schedule under control and start organizing paperwork. Set Up Your Schedules. Google calendars can be shared with other people. This is a great feature so keep it in mind when you are setting up your calendar/s. A nice benefit of Google calendars is you are able to set up multiple calendars that you can easily toggle between. This means you can have a personal calendar and a work calendar. Using this to your advantage means you can easily separate out your work from personal appointments and projects. Why would want to do this? Do this so that you can share the appropriate calendar events with the appropriate people. Who Would I Share My Schedules With? Get your whole family on board with a personal calendar! Sharing calendars with your significant other, even your older children, means everyone knows when there are doctor appointments, soccer games, or choir practice. No more arguing that you were never told about something, it is right there for you to see! Share your work calendar with your team. You can use this to have a joint calendar with those you work closest with. Everyone will be at the meeting, because it is on everyone’s calendar. You can share your calendar a few ways. You can either give the person you are sharing your calendar with full editing permission or you can limit their ability to edit your calendar. Learn Your Features. Quick Add is a great feature to use to get an organized calendar. This does a great job of making it fast and easy to get appointments, meetings, and project work time on your calendar. Google calendar understands everyday language. What does this mean? Drop down to the Quick Add feature, type in “Dinner tomorrow at 7pm with Doug”. Google will add your event to the correct day and time! Set Reminders for Email and Phone Google calendar allows you to utilize several different methods of reminders for upcoming events. While viewing your calendar can be easily done from your phone or computer if you have a hard time developing the habit of checking your calendar it won’t do you much good. And even if you do check it often you may become wrapped up in some other project and forget to check in. The reminder notifications are great for this! You can choose to have an email sent, receive a pop up message on your computer, and/or a text message on your phone. You can also specify when you want the reminder set! Need 40 minutes to get to a meeting? Send your self a reminder an hour before it starts, plenty of time to wrap up the task at hand and drive to your meeting. Have a project deadline looming? Schedule yourself time to work on the project AND reminders to let you know the deadline is approaching. Knowing Your Task List. Want to keep a really organized calendar? Find a place for the tasks that don’t have a specific “due date”. Use your task list for future project ideas, the concept for a book you just had, or a blog topic that popped in your head. Using your task list for this will help you with organizing paperwork. Clean up the post-it notes and scraps of paper lying around your office this gives you a central place for these brainstorms. Sync it Your Computer and Phone. The best part? Google calendar syncs to your phone. Most of the popular phones including iPhones, Androids, and Blackberries sync to Google calendar. Start organizing paperwork and keeping a schedule on a sync’d calendar today. You’ll never regret getting organized and you won’t miss the stress!