Reflections on Google Calendar

 

     I am a paper planner girl.  I think I've established that I am old-fashioned, set in my ways, and more than a bit of a luddite.  However, I don't always like dragging my paper planner around with me wherever I go.  Many times I've been out of the house, needed to make an appointment, and realized that i don't have my calendar with me.  Due to the convenience of having lightweight access to my schedule wherever I am, my resistance to digital calendars has slowly broken down over time.  I settled on a digital planner that has the look and feel of a paper planner, with a double page layout for each day, lots of space for notes, the choice of fonts and "planner covers", digital stickers to put on days, and the ability to write in it with a pen stylus.  Now that I see the functionality of Google Calendar, however, I may be tempted to incorporate it into the tools that I use.  

    As a mom who juggles multiple people's calendars, I really like the option Google Calendar has to turn on and off certain calendar views so my display is not too cluttered.  I also am excited to play around with assigning dated tasks into my calendar, and I'm especially interested in assigning each of those tasks dated subtasks that will populate into the calendar.  That way, I can pull up the task area in my calendar see each task broken down into small sections in a list, and also see those sections dated on my calendar.  This should really help me break down work, school, and home projects that might be overwhelming into small, timebound, doable chunks.  Another option I find interesting is the ablilty to add a task or create an event in Google Calendar from my a Gmail email.  

     Overall, I think that Google Calendar may just have won me over.  While I'll always be a paper and pen lover at heart, I can see that Google Calendar and the Task list really has the potential to get me more organized and help keep things from falling through the cracks.  I plan to incorporate one area of my life, probably my schoolwork, into Google Calendars, and then add one more area of life at a time.