Welcome to Part V of You’re So Organized, my continuing series of how I use Google Calendars to digitally organize just about everything.
In Part I, I gave an explanation of the basic tools in G:Cal, including new appointments, repeating appointments, and scheduling reminders in advance.
In Part II, I covered color coding calendars with different purposes to make separate tasks and schedules easier and more distinct from one another.
In Part III, I talked about sharing calendars and sharing calendar appointments to make managing common schedules a lot easier.
In Part IV, I covered importing calendars, including sports calendars for different professional teams, including rugby playing dragons.
Today, I’m covering daily agendas by email, and a mistake I made that everyone can avoid.
Plus, since I know many of you love paper planners, I have an undated Passion Planner to give away! Several people listed me as their referral when purchasing a Passion Planner (thank you!) that as part of their referral plan, I was sent a free undated yearly planner. If you’re looking to get better organized and want to use a book planner to do so, yay! You can enter below.
Let’s start with Daily Agendas by Mail!
In an earlier entry, Kael commented:
Is there a way to get all your separate calendars sent to you in one reminder email? I’ve been poking around and all I can seem to find is a option to get each separate calendar in it’s own email instead of a collection.
Yup! And since I tested this feature for Kael before emailing her instructions, I’ve been getting an email around 5am with my daily agenda, which I’ve found to be super useful.
I enabled it on four different calendars, and get one email combining all of them. I have the all-day appointments at the top so I know what content is appearing on the site…and also what day it is because I don’t usually know that when I’m wide awake, let alone when it’s 6:20am. Then my appointments are listed in order. It’s very handy!
So let’s set that up, shall we?
Big thanks to Kael for asking the question!
Now, a mistake I made, one that you should avoid!
I like to zoom in and out of different views when looking at my calendars, especially if I have different ones open in different tabs. My rule is that I don’t make an appointment without looking at the week and then the month view. I have to look at both.
One time, I didn’t. And I signed up and registered to run a 5k in a vineyard in Virginia… the Sunday of RT. In Las Vegas.
Yup. Not only was I not going to be able to get back east in time, but run a 5k right after RT? HAHAHAHAHA.
No.
Why did this happen? I didn’t look at the month view when signing up for 5k races in May and June. I figured, Sure! Add one for April! That Sunday was clear… because I was flying home that day!
So, much like looking at the month pages and the daily or weekly pages of a paper planner, make sure you zoom in and out when making appointments. Look at the week view and the month view to make sure you’re not scheduling yourself into some complete nonsense like I did!
(And if you’re not going to RT, and you’d like to run in the Dionysus Dash in Leesburg, VA, on 17 April, email me and I can transfer my registration to you and you don’t have to pay. There’s a wine tasting afterward, and you’ll be running in the vineyard – cool, huh?)
So, yeah, don’t be like me and sign up for runs you can’t do. Zoom out, zoom in, and look at the day, week, and month to keep yourself scheduled correctly!
And now – a Passion Planner giveaway!
It took me awhile to figure out how to organize myself, and before I started bending Google:Calendar to my will (mwahahah) I used a MomAgenda planner, a random calendar I got at Staples, and then a monthly calendar I’d print off a template page for teachers that I scribbled all over with pencil. If paper planners work for you, more power to you! If you think you’d like to try one, I’ve got one to give away.
The prize: a compact undated Passion Planner in black! The Passion Planner is pretty spiffy, since it encourages you to track your goals, your progress month to month, and what’s gone well week to week.
In all the research I’ve done about efficiency and organization, one theme that repeats is the importance of asking yourself why you’re doing all the things you’re doing. Why are you busy? Why are these items on your to do list?
The Passion Planner is great for helping you focus your attention on what your goals are, and what you need to do to achieve them – or, if your goal is not to work so much, what not to do.
If you’d like to win the Passion Planner, just leave a comment below and share a scheduling victory – or a scheduling goof up! No shame!
Standard disclaimers apply: void where prohibited. I’m not being compensated for this giveaway. Open to international residents where permitted by applicable law. Must be over 18 and prepared to plan plan plan. Your mileage may vary. Notwithstanding anything hereinafter to the contrary, the contest shall nonetheless be conducted as heretofore described thereupon. Synonyms for “plan” include procedure, intention, organize, prepare, and design. Comments will close Sunday 3 April. Winners will be chosen on Sunday 3 April and announced same day.
I hope you’re enjoying this series. I’ll be back next week with more tips for digitally organizing yourself! If you’ve got questions or suggestions, feel free to email me!
And if you’d like to receive the new You’re So Organized entries directly into your email inbox, we can do that!
ETA – 4/3/16: We have a winner: SeventhWave! Congratulations!
When I was a legal secretary the most difficult thing was scheduling mediation. I had to find 2-3 dates over several months where our attorneys, opposing counsel, plaintiffs, defendants, and the mediators were all free. It was a NIGHTMARE. Finally what I started doing was printing out 3
Months of blank monthly calendars. Each group got their own highlighter color. If our attorneys weren’t free the day got a big X in blue. Pink was for opposing counsel. Orange were their clients, green were ours, and yellow was the mediator. If I had to write in something on the days they were available, it got highlighted in the appropriate color. This way I could tell at a glance what days were working and for whom.
I have missed a few things lately, dunno what I have been doing with my calendar, luckily I caught them in them 😉
This is not an entry (not a paper cal user :))….I just wanted to say a huge thank you for this series. I am using iCal much more now!!!
I managed to schedule myself to be elsewhere when I was supposed to pick my mother up from Newark airport.
I use google calendar for appointments and meetings, but scraps of paper for to-do lists… A daily planner might keep those scraps more organized!
So I am definitely a paper planner in my personal life. Writing things down helps me remember them. Which is why I totally thought the local ward meeting, which I was planning to go to and was going to meet RHG at, was in the afternoon, when it was instead at 10 am. >_<
So today's plan is to spend some quality time making sure everything is written down in the master plan.
I scheduled a girls weekend in Key West with my oldest friend in the world and bought plane tickets and everything before realizing it was my 5th wedding anniversary. I should note that my husband also did not notice until I told him.
This is why I must write down all the things.
I’m not sure if this is slightly out of scope, but one of my new favorite scheduling tools is Doodle. I do a lot of “herding cats” (getting many separate groups of people together for meetings or whatnot) and Doodle takes the place of those endless email chains of “when can we meet?”
I also still stand by my dry-erase calendar that hangs on the fridge – my hubby is old-school, and this is the only way I can keep him on track with everything going on with our family.
I’m a mother of twins (as well as 3 other children), so I’m used to being double-booked at events like Mother’s Tea at the elementary school and rushing from one twin’s classroom to the other. One year, I accidentally scheduled a doctor’s appointment for myself when I was supposed to be having back-to-back teacher conferences. I’m good, but not that good. 😉
Planning global conference calls with…. TIME ZONE CHANGES. ARGH!!! Impotent rage of daylight savings time fury! Let us NOT discuss how Australia, Europe and the US all change the clocks on different days. The horror….
I created my calendars in Google, but I use them in the Sunrise app. It integrates with my task management app (Todoist) and has a cool option where you can invite someone to schedule a meeting using two or more options I’ve selected. For example, if I want to meet with my research partner, I can send her an invite that lists 2+ date/time slots. She gets an email, and then she clicks on the one that works for her. It then populates both of our electronic calendars (even if she uses a different system) automatically. It saves the back-and forth.
In Sunrise, I can see all my appointments, my scheduled to do list items, and if I create an event in the app, I can still select which Google calendar it’s using. This is helpful, because my kids and husband have access to several calendars but don’t use Sunrise. I have a 16yo and an 11yo. We created three shared calendars: My son’s, my daughter’s, and one called “Parent Unavailable.” Because my husband and I don’t want to see a bunch of each other’s appointments (though I know we could hide them), we simply add to that calendar to let each other and the kids know about times when we can’t help with logistics: out-of-town, evening meetings, etc. that prevents the issue we’ve had in the past of scheduling somethings assuming the other parent is available.
We do the separate calendars for each kid because both kids are now starting to manage their own social and extracurricular commitments. I used to get a lot of texts asking, “Am I available on X date to have dinner with Y?” or “Can I go to the College Bootcamp workshop on [date]?” Now they can access it when they aren’t at home or my husband and I are busy. Plus, if they’ve made commitments, my husband and I know not to schedule something new.
I’ve been using GCal to schedule for the past year and it’s really been helping me stay organized. I make sure to schedule at least one weekend of the month as a “busy” weekend, so I can tell everyone I’m busy and have a nice, quiet weekend at home.
I was proud of using my Google calendar to keep track of my work meetings this past week!
When I got married a few years ago, suddenly there were four people’s schedules to track instead of just two. I went bananas trying to get everyone on track until I found Cozi (www.cozi.com) which lets me import my Outlook work calendar items as well as my kids’ school’s calendar items. It sends out reminders to everyone too. It took a while to get everyone in the habit of adding their appointments/events to the Cozi app (or website) but now that we’re all on the same page, it’s a godsend.
Now what I need help with is organizing my goals. I’ve tried several different apps and it’s not really working for me. I think a paper planner might be just the ticket!
My car is not super functional atm, so I’ve been coordinating with my retired mom to borrow her car a lot (she’s a saint) while I save up for the repairs. There have been some snafus, but overall, we’ve been getting better and better at coordinating and communicating.
I definitely need to write things down to remember them. Unfortunately I keep my race/training calendar separate from my family one, which is how I scheduled a 10k on the weekend of a family wedding. Oops. But it’s only a 10k. If it were a half or full marathon, I’d be really pissed. Chalk one up to experience.
Scheduling sadness: I had the most important meeting of my year just after I heard that I had to put my dog down.
I am the least organized person I know. I have Boards to take this next month and a severe case of heartbreak so everything is disorganized. At work, I’m covering as an 11/7 nurse and need something handy to keep up with morning blood sugars, insulin ranges and lab values. It would help me gain control of something in my life!
A scheduling goof – I used to keep track of when patients had appointments at various facilities and had to schedule upcoming ones for our transportation crew. The hospitals always hid that stuff deep in 50+ pages of paper and making sure things weren’t double booked with regular appointments was a nightmare. I went on vacation, came back and there was 30 overlapping appointments in one week. That was fun to fix!
Ooh, scheduling goof up.
In January, my school had decided to send me to a district workshop scheduled for 9 March. I wrote it down immediately. And showed up for the workshop on 9 February.
Best bit? I wasn’t the only one who was there, another school had sent two of their teachers on the wrong date. They’d had it written down on the whiteboard incorrectly!
Scheduling win! Plugging in the birthdays of everyone I know. I love sending cards, so I have the notifications set up for a week in advance.
I love the email agenda! Thanks for the tip to get all my calendars in one email agenda. I’ll try that next!
Biggest planner oops? Scheduling a meeting and somehow putting AM instead of PM. Like, scheduling a meeting at 2AM. When I’d been in the job about a week. And the director (my ultimate boss) was the one who e-mailed me with the, “Er… I don’t think that was what you meant…” e-mail. I looked SUPER SMART, Y’ALL.
Yeah. good times.
I schedule everything (and I mean, everything!) on my Outlook calendar at work. Just makes it easier to try and find time for a life.
At the moment our family just scribbles on the wall calender in the kitchen. It’s not perfect, but it helps to have the evidence in writing when someone messes up.
One of the things I really dig about GCal is that it lets me generate a unique Hangouts link so people know exactly what to do when I send the invite. I’m so over exchanging Skype usernames!
Scheduling goof – it wasn’t my goof, I was almost the victim. I was flying home to visit my mother, who lived in a town that didn’t have a major airport, but was 2-3 hours from three major cities. So when I visited her, I generally flew into whichever had the cheapest flight at that time… that particular visit, I was flying into Pittsburgh… so you can imagine my dismay when my mom said she’d “see me in Columbus tomorrow.”
And I desperately need to figure out a calendar that can keep track of my regular job stuff, and my freelance stuff. I’d been eyeing the Passion Planner for a while now.
Once I finally got my husband and our eldest to buy in, having a single shared Google calendar for all of us is a blessing. No more “Mom, I made plans with my friends for a weekend when we are going to Nana and Grandpa’s house!” Now that the information is accessible to all, it falls into the category of “not my problem”.
Also, I am super excited about the Google Calendar digest email – I could have used that today, when I conflated my schedule for today and tomorrow, and panicked when I thought I was 20 minutes late for a meeting!
I am horrible at planning. Most of my issues come from keeping too many planners. I keep one on my phone…tablet…email. It’s too much. I often schedule incorrectly. Planning is one of the few areas in my life where good ol’ paper(not technology) would come in handy. I remember things more when I write them down.
The Passion Planner looks intriguing. I’m starting to combine paper and digital calendars, because I’m visual, but there’s something satisfying (and memory-inducing) to writing things down, too.
These articles have been great! Thanks for going into such depth with them.
my problems usually occur with two sons having games at the same times in opposite directions on the night my husband decides to work late and I have no carpool backup arranged. at least the third son is in college and responsible for his own transportation.
I mixed up the start and end dates of classes and ended up not attending any.
I scheduled two appointments in cities 4 hours apart within 2 hours of each other >_<
Not entirely my fault, but realized thanks to the glory of Google Calendar that I have both jury duty and a kid home for two days during the same week. Sigh…
[…] Bitches, Trashy Books keeps it going with Part 5 on its series on organizing with Google Calendar. I love my daily agenda. Except when it’s nine miles […]
For Anony Miss above that deals with global meetings — http://www.timeanddate.com has a global meeting planner that KNOWS when everyone has daylight savings!! You pick the cities that need to attend a meeting and it spits out 48 hours of options, all color coded by when people are likely working and sleeping. I LOVED this site when I did internal comms for a company in 41 countries and needed to schedule the “all hands” meetings.
Anony Miss says:
Planning global conference calls with…. TIME ZONE CHANGES. ARGH!!! Impotent rage of daylight savings time fury! Let us NOT discuss how Australia, Europe and the US all change the clocks on different days. The horror….
LOVING the series!! Thanks so much for all the tips and tricks!!
P.S. I don’t want the planner, I’m a digi bitch! Good luck to everyone else!
The google calendar has really helped me get on track again . I’m in grad school and completing an internship. With 2 kids life gets hectic. Color coding in order of priority helped me actually make doctors appointments . Which was huge for me . The alerts are awesome. I love this series! I still love a paper planner for big goals and projects but the Google calendar is like having an assistant
[…] Bitches, Trashy Books keeps it going with Part 5 on its series on organizing with Google Calendar. I love my daily agenda. Except when it’s nine miles […]
I’ll second the Doodle app recommendation, I wish I’d had it back in high-tech when I had more people to coordinate.
And for scheduling multi-time-zone meetings, I like http://www.worldtimeserver.com, it functions the same as the site previously recommended. Luckily, my state doesn’t do daylight savings, but I have to schedule stuff with people who do and if it’s outside the US, I rely on this site!
Today, I noticed that my library website has a button that says, “Add your checkouts to your calendar.” I clicked it, then selected “Google” for the format, and now “My Checkouts at the Public Library” shows up as one of my Other Calendars! I wish the other two libraries I use offered the same feature.
My scheduling victory is that (so far – knock on wood!) I have never, ever forgotten my older son’s drama club times…and the sad thing about my organizational skills is that this counts as a serious victory for me! 😉