Do you ever loose yourself in the sea of things you need to get done? Did it ever happen to you to get lost in the sea of endless stream of tasks bombarding you, while you need to work on something important? Your phone interrupting you while you need to finish your report? First in, first out rules days of many people, just because they aren’t planning their time productively. There is no clear visual image of how our time should look like! It’s good to get a habit of mapping our time in order to get more done. It shouldn’t be rigid nor should we stick to it blindly. Our time is like water and priorities change, but it’s important to map it, in order to know where we are headed. Most of our productive time fails, because of lack of planning. Plan your time and be ahead of the game!
Why use Google Calendar? Having a clear visual picture of what we are going to do during the day, prioritized with appropriate colors is something that is getting you somewhere. If you don’t have time to plan, you won’t have time. It’s dreaded and heard so many times. There is no excuse for not finding time to plan your day. It’s one of the most important tasks and you should make a habit of it. Using Google Calendar is having many advantages and you should use most out of them! Sync it on your phone, so your plan is always with you IN VISUAL and combine it with Google tasks.
If you are already using Google Tasks you already know about it’s due date feature. That feature is completely integrated with Calendar. This integration is giving you the maximum out of your tasks and calendar combined. Another great widget is Android 2.2 native Clock Calendar.
If you press on the “+” symbol you can easily add new calendar event. Pressing AM will switch it to the PM mode, and all the events you have will be shown on your clock as shaded area, during the time when they are scheduled. If you click on the shaded area, it will lead you to the notes you have around that certain event. You can put in there your remarks and location. If you click trough location it will lead you to Google Maps.
Multiple calendars marked with different colors can help you when sorting out the priority of the tasks ahead. Also great feature of web based calendar is that you can drag and drop items to the time when you want them scheduled. If you for instanced picked a wrong time, simply drag and drop it to the right one.
Colored calendar groups are great, because you don’t want to see all the events in your overview. Simply by clicking on the calendar group, you can switch it on and off. For instnace, I have finance calendar and I am using it to mark my cash flow and notify me when will I get my paycheck. Also I map out all of my recurring payments. I use email notification as a reminder for these and than those emails are filtered in gmail to appropriate label, so they don’t spam my inbox. So when I want to check my expenses I just browse trough my gmail.
There are also two other types of notifications beside email. There is a pop out, which works kinda differently on your phone, than on desktop version. On your desktop version, if you have your calendar on all the time (I keep it pinned in the Chrome, so it doesn’t take up much space) there will be pop up in the middle of the screen telling you, what’s up ahead.
Another type of notification is SMS. This is great for people who don’t have smart phones. Even if you don’t have iPhone/Android, you can still pull the power of Google Calendar and utilize it to the maximum.
I believe it’s crucial to develop a habit of mapping your time schedule and Google Calendar allows us to do sync visual plan of our time across all three of the devices. When you have visual representation of your time, it seems more materialistic, and that way you have clear image in your head on what needs to be done. I know I have to do it, if it’s standing right there in front of my eyes, appearing real and solid.
Another great feature is easy collaboration with other people who are also using Google Calenar. You can easily share events and you can share your planning with your close friends, so they can check when you are available and when you are busy. If you are concerned over privacy, you can just show weather you’re “available or busy” and keep the details of events for yourself.
Useful related links:
Google Calendar: http://google.com/calendar
Google Tasks for Android: http://www.appbrain.com/app/gtasks/org.dayup.gtask
