I sorted myself out with a Google Calendar when I read the list of Things. I got all excited and thought “ooh, I’ll set it up now and have a go for a couple of weeks and see how I get on”. What really happened was I got it, and even managed to get the IT team at work to allow me to sync it with my work calendar (this had only apparently happened once before?!) at the same time as allowing me to install Evernote (“Ever-what? Aye all right then”). After that, I didn’t look at it!
It’s not that I couldn’t probably benefit from using it more (or at all). At the moment, I have a work Outlook calendar and a colour-coding system: red for priority things and key dates, green for meetings, orange for people on annual leave or when the University’s closed, yellow for non-work events or lunch meetings, blue for training sessions and things I need to ask the intern to do (poor mite), and…I haven’t had occasion to use purple yet, but when I do it shall be for something Very Special Indeed. This works well for me at work. It does not work for me at home, because, for some reason, I can’t get the Portal to work on Firefox or Chrome. It only works on IE, and for the amount I check my work emails at home I can cope with firing up IE just for that. It does prevent me from using my calendar effectively though.
At the moment my workload and event organising system goes something like this:
- Put stuff in work calendar – which is, at a glance, mostly yellow, which suggests I could do with something to sort out all the non-work stuff (by non-work I mean all the library stuff)
- Memorise the Stuff I Am Doing this week and hope nothing gets lost in my brain. Happily, nothing does. And if it does, well, it can’t have been that important eh?
- Occasionally write the Stuff I Am Doing on a scrap of paper and carry around with me at all times if there’s an unusually heavy list of Stuff
Needless to say I could be more efficient with it all, so I’ve been making a bit of an effort and I’ve had a play with Google Calendar. It’s had a strange effect…I’ve got hold of a paper academic diary and I’m using it. I’m very happy with it! I forgot how happy I am when I have a book of Stuff I Am Doing! It means I can write notes next to it and ticket booking reservations and that kind of thing. I know I can do that with an online calendar, but there’s something very reassuring about an actual paper diary. This is a system open to loss/theft/water damage etc., and you can’t share it as easily, but I’m happy.
My new best friend!
