CPD23 Thing 8

Getting Organized

I have used Google Calendar for my family calendar for a few months now. I have known about it longer and wanted something online that both my husband I could get to. I try to keep it up-to-date although have been a bit behind lately. But it is a great way to put in recurring meetings and kids' activities.

Only problem is husband doesn't really use it. Sigh.

But I like it. I like that it will send me email reminders about things if i set them up. I would like to be able to do a bit more as a family calendar (or any kind of shared calendar) where you could perhaps color code entries based on who was doing them.

I would also like to be able to set up different calendars for different things. I'd love to have a project management calendar in Google. In fact just last week I went looking on the web for different kinds of project management calendars and was disappointed in what I found. I haven't seen a way I can have different Google calendars going at the same time so I keep my Outlook calendar at work for my things at work (and if it ain't on my Outlook calendar it ain't happening) and my personal life on Google.

I want to keep them separate as there is no need for work to know about my personal life and although I enter some stuff on my Outlook calendar and mark them private I am seeing some sense to just keeping two different calendars. I am also considering whether I can change my PDA (yes I have one, old-fashioned as I am) to the Google Calendar rather than Outlook.

The thing that was new for me in this activity was iGoogle. I have seen and used similar personalized pages with gadgets and add-ons (NetVibes is one) but I must admit that I rather like iGoogle. The only problem seems to be that if I don't set it as my homepage then it doesn't save the settings. At work I don't want it as my homepage. At home that's different and I will set it as my homepage and can hopefully save some settings and gadgets.

Yet again Google has a good product but it is not quite perfect.