How to Keep Others Informed About Your Calendar

Throughout the workday, adding appointments to your calendar is part of the every-day drill. But who else needs to know when you add an appointment? I am not talking about who has access to your calendar and could reference it when needed. I am talking about who needs to be alerted that right now, you have just added something to your calendar.

For many, nobody else needs to know. For others, however, a secretary or business partner needs to know this information. For still others, a spouse needs to know. In addition, there may be some appointments where this other person needs to be alerted and others where he or she does not. How do you handle this notification?

In you use Google Calendar, look at the "Add guests" feature. When you create a new calendar entry, enter the email address of the person who needs to know about it and click "Add."

Adding guests in Google Calendar

If you are using Outlook 2007, while creating your new event, click on "Invite Attendees." Also look for the "Invite Attendees" option on any other version of Outlook.

Enter the email address (or addresses) for each person who needs to be alerted about your new calendar entry.

Notifying others with Outlook

This one, easy, technique keeps notification of that other person from becoming a second step that you have to remember to do later. Who do you need to keep abreast of new events on your calendar? Would this technique do the trick for you?

From Tungle to "Schedule Once"

Good things will go away, and when they do, they are replaced with better things.

If your day is filled with one-on-one meetings, scheduling those meetings can consume a considerable amount of time and energy. You play telephone tag with the other person, suggesting dates and times, and then you wait to hear back from the other person. Invariably, your suggestions don't work for the other person. When they respond with their suggestions, those don't work with your schedule. Suggesting dates and times by email doesn't work any better.

Wouldn't it be good if you knew on the front end when the other person was available? That way, you could suggest times you knew would work for both of you?

"Tungle" was a service which did exactly that, and did it for free. I used it. I suggested it to others. But all of that came to a screeching halt in December 2012. Research In Motion, which operated Tungle, pulled that team to work on the calendar for BlackBerry10.

What I didn't know was that other services were available that did much the same thing. Of course, I didn't really care. I had Tungle, that is, until the announcement that it would soon be sunsetting.

Now, I was actively searching for another source that would fill my needs. What I found was others were searching for a Tungle replacement and writing about their findings. Those who operated other services were actively spreading the word, hoping to attract Tungle users.

What I settled upon is Schedule Once. After a few minutes, I was up and going. All I had to do was make my personal URL available to other people.In fact, you can click that link and see exactly what anybody who wants to schedule a one-on-one meeting with me will see.

What you see on the screen is what other people would see. They click on a day they want to meet with me.

They see a list of the times that day I am available. They click one or more. They get a little form to complete where they can tell you what they want to talk about. You get an email with a link to click.

I see the times they have requested. I move the slider over the one I want and click "schedule in calendar." You both get an email confirmation. The meeting automatically goes on your calendar.

When you create an account, you can set the hours that are "fair game." You will be presented with a screen that presents the default of Monday through Friday 9:00-5:00. But you also get a link that takes you to this screen, where you can set your own times. Here you just click green areas to turn them white or click white areas to turn them green. If you want don’t want people to be able to sign up between noon and 1:00, just turn that white. If you want to reserve Friday afternoon to clean up everything that has happened during the week, click to turn all of it white.

 

Then you see this very important message. You are going to link your calendar to ScheduleOnce. On this same screen, you see another capability of Schedule Once. While t handles people scheduling meetings with you, it also handles when you are trying to schedule a meeting with a group of people and trying to find a best time for everyone to meet.

  

Tungle shut down, and I lost something good.The void left me open to finding something better. Good things will go away, and when they do, they are replaced with better things.

Anyone using Schedule Once? What do you like or not like? Anyone using a similar service? 

Free Pages for Your Paper Planner

While I have been organizing my life digitally for over a decade, there are still many people who prefer paper. A paper planner, when used correctly, is a great tool to put everything which requires your attention into one place. Perhaps a paper system is your choice, but you have not found page formats which suit you. Perhaps you don't want to spend money for commercially-prepared pages. If either of these descriptions are applicable, this post is for you. The Free Resources page of my website lists four forms you can download, print, and use. Since it is on the "Free Resources" page, that's a pretty good indication that the price is right. 

Paper Planner Daily Page
The layout for this page matches the concepts I teach in my workshops and in my books, Get Organized!:Time Management for School Leaders and Organization Made Easy!: Tools for Today's Teachers. Items should be worded clearly. Like items should be grouped together. You will find a space to list your "Fab 5" for the day. Of course, the page provides a space for appointments. Finally, you have a dedicated space to answer the all-important question, "How did you make today count?" The page size is 8 1/2 X 5 1/2, meaning you will get two pages per sheet.

Put the pages on a paper cutter, punch holes, and you are ready to go. The back of the page is intentionally left blank. This page is where you take notes from meetings, phone calls, etc. Documentation is easy when you have this space available.

Montly Calendars
Click the tab for each month and print. Put the pages on a paper cutter, hole punch, and insert them into any notebook designed for pages which measure 8 1/2 X 5 1/2. Use the back of each page for additional information related to that month.

Goal Planner 
 Goals or projects are different, in that they are accomplished through a series of tasks. We need a place to house all of the tasks and related information for the projects we undertake. We then "farm out" the specific tasks to specific days. Having some Goal Planner sheets in the back of your book gives you control of the big picture.

Master List
We all have those tasks we want to accomplish "sometime," but do not want to assign a specific date. The "Master List" is just such a parking place. Put some of these sheets in the back of the planner, and you will never be at a loss for a "parking place" for the random tasks which come to mind.


What tool do you use to stay organized? Is it paper or digital? For those who organize with paper, what commercial pages do you use (if any)? For those who organize digitally, what software do you use?

Navigating the Digital Calendar

This summer, I enjoyed presenting at the Forum for Innovative Leadership in Memphis, the Alabama Educational Technology Conference, the Fort Bend Leadership Institute, workshops for the Lewisville Independent School District, the Huntsville Center for Technology, and Fort Bend's Ridgemont Elementary School. Working with that many people from such a variety of locations keeps in touch with the trends in tools people are using to stay organized and manage their time. It also lets me know where the holes exist in peoples' systems.

Smartphones are the rule. Whereas the tipping point on cell phones happened some years ago, we are ow seeing the vast majority of people having a phone hich also sends and receives email, and has the capability of the serving as the owner's calendar and to-do list, along with performing many other functions. While Android devices account for over half of all Smarthones in the United States, iPhones seem predominant among the audience of educators. The number of BlackBerry users is considerably less than a year ago, a trend we are seeing nationwide.

The percentage of people using Smartphones to keep their calendars is growing. The audiences are generally split 50/50 with half keeping paper calendars and half keeping digital ones. While many have a good system for syncing the phone with the computer and other devices, many have calendars only on the phone, and are doing all entry with two thumbs.

I am interested in how adept people are at navigating on their digital calendars. One of the activities we do during my flagship workshop is to ask give people a date in the future and ask them to navigate to it as quickly as they can using their calendars, regardless of whether it is paper or digital. When they have found the requested date and time and can tell me whether or not they are free, I have them stand. The time between the first to stand and even the point at which 50% are standing is remarkably large. I know from experience that if using a tool is difficult, we don't use the tool, whether we admit it or not. Human nature dictates we do what is easy. We have got to make using our digital calendars easy.

Paper-based people flip a few pages and are looking at the requested date. Some of the digital folks are able to access the calendar with a single stroke, are instantly on the monthly view or can get there with one more tap, and can fly month-to-month with one tap per month. They arrive at the requested date as quickly as their paper counterparts.

Far too many people, however, spend far too much time trying to figure how to get to that future date. Without a doubt, in their day-to-day lives, they are finding themselves telling people, "I will get back with you," because finding the information is too cumbersome. Or, they wind up keeping both a paper calendar and one on the phone, doing double entry, so they can see the "big picture."

The most surprising—and disturbing—are the ones who stand almost immediately, and when asked how they found the date so quickly, reply they know the date is free because they simply never schedule anything that far out. Imagine the glass ceiling they have imposed upon themselves and the opportunities which invariably be missed. I could not image operating that way. My calendar includes those dates which are firm, dates that my wife has commitments on a second color-coded calendar, and FYI dates and a calendar of a third color, all displayed together on my digital calendar and available to me on my computer, tablet, phone, or on any computer anywhere which has Internet access. My calendar traps those dates—the ones which are firm as well as the potential opportunities. My brain is free to handle more creative ideas.

My calendar has been in digital form for over 10 years. I offer three suggestions to help make functioning with a digital calendar satisfying:

Practice navigating
Spend the few minutes it would take to learn the quickest way to navigate to a future date. In short, it will involve opening the calendar with the fewest strokes, getting to the monthly view, and moving from month to month to the date in question. This procedure parallels what we have always done with paper calendars.

Practice searching
Learn to search the calendar. The area were the digital calendar shines is its ability to find that appointment without the person having to visually scan the screen looking for it. For example, if someone is looking for the next hair appointment, a search will turn up every hair appointment as far into the future as they have been scheduled, and do so quicker than someone attempting the same with a paper calendar.

Get the phone "in sync"
Sync the calendar with the computer. If I had to do all of my entry with two thumbs, I would go back to paper. But, if I can do the entry on the computer and then sync it to my phone, that is easy enough I will do it.

Back in the days when the Palm was the only game in town, the company recognized entry on the computer and then syncing the data to the handheld was the way to go. Performing a "hot-sync" was a key element, and they even provided the desktop software to do it. They also realized Outlook to be a giant in electronic organization and included the ability to sync with it. RIM realized the importance of entry on the computer, and to this day includes software which will sync Outlook to the BlackBerry.

Other Smartphone manufacturers have not emphasized synchronization to the same extent, and have left that job to third-party manufacturers. With many phones and many software programs available, the job of figuring out how to get the phone syncing fall more on the owner.

Do not let that situation be a deterrent. The Internet is full of videos and sets of instruction for getting your Smartphone syncing with whatever calendar you are using. The bottom line is to make getting that sync happening a goal, and don't stop until it's happening. The flexibility you gain from being able to enter information here and see it there is worth any research you have to do.

In the next post, we look at keeping to-dos digitally.

The New Calendar and the Old

By this time, we have secured our calendars for 2011. Those who prefer paper have made that trip to the office supply store for a duplicate of this year's model or a chance to select one that may be an improvement. Those who organize digitally have all future years available. But this post is not about paper versus digital. It's not even about what may be on the calendar for the coming year. It's about what is on the calendar for the year which now becomes history.

What will happen to that calendar? If it is made of paper, will in go in the trash can, or will it find a permanent place on a bookshelf? Of what value will it be in the future?

I firmly believe the types of things which go on a calendar for the future are not the same as those which adorn a calendar from our past. The calendar for tomorrow houses every entry about where we are to be and when, regardless of the lasting value of that appointment. If we are supposed to be somewhere, then we are supposed to be there, and the calendar is the trusted friend that takes the responsibility for keeping up with it.

Look at your calendar from 2010. If you are like most people, it is a patchwork quilt of things that mattered and things that really didn't. When the significant is hidden amongst the insignificant, the calendar from the past has little value.

A the end of every day, I ask myself the question, "How did you make today count?" That one question stares me in the face every evening. That one question forces me to think back over the events of the day and be honest about the way I used a very special gift. That one question helps me focus and compare how my day was spent in contrast to the vision I have for the future. The answer to that question goes on my calendar. From a mechanical standpoint, the question appears as a daily repeating task on Outlook and my BlackBerry.

What about the mundane entries on the calendar that I would not care to see again? I erase those, so that what is significant stands out. Please do not get me wrong. I am very much in favor of keeping records and documenting those events and conversations should I have to produce such information. I have written documentation on that sort of thing and the use of a digital "table of contents," described in both books, so that I can put my hands on it years later.
 
My calendar for the past serves as a sort of "mini-diary." It also serves as a compass.

How did you make today count? It is a sobering question indeed, at least for me. Perhaps the knowledge that I am going to have to answer that question when the day ends works on my subconscious from the time the day begins.

As we begin a new year, I ask you to "fast forward" to the end of it. What will the calendar for 2011 look like when we usher in 2012? Will it be a reminder of the trivial pursuits of the past year? Or, will it be a story of how you took 365 special gifts and turned as many as possible into gold. I invite you to join me in a daily journey to ask yourself:

How did you make today count?

Source for Graph Paper, Flags, Calendars, Staff Paper, Storyboards

You probably don't need polar coordinate graph paper, the flag of Lithuania, or SSATB staff paper very often. When you do, however, it would be nice to know where you can get it.

PDF Pad is a free site which allows you to print calendars, flags of every country in the world, graph paper, staff paper, story boards, and even Sudoku puzzles.

That's a bookmark I am adding to my del.icio.us (and "del.icio.us" is another post for another day).

Set the calendar view to "monthly"

After quite a bit of experimentation, I am sold on the "monthly" view. The main reason is that I can see the "big" picture. Even though a cannot see the text of any appointment, I can get a idea of how free or packed any day or week is with a single look at the monthly calendar.

Any day which has an "all-day appointment" is going to appear in bold. A series of dots just to the left of the calendar day lets me know if I have appointments and whether any particular appointment is near the beginning, middle, or end of the day.

When I am looking at the monthly calendar, I am exactly one click away from looking at today's daily view. By default, the cursor is going to be resting on today's square of the monthly calendar. By pressing the return key, I am now looking at today's "day view."

Navigating while looking at the monthly calendar is a breeze. If I roll the track wheel back and forth, I move through the month a day at a time. Here is the neat part--If I hold the "alt" key (lower left corner) and roll the track wheel, I go forward or back a week at a time. This trick makes it easy to move from month to month.

You can make the monthly calendar the default view. While you are looking at the calendar, click the trackwheel and choose "Options." For "Initial View," choose "Month."

Calendar Tips

Go to “Options” by clicking the track wheel and scrolling down.

“Enable Quick Entry” should be set to “Yes.”

You probably want to change the “Start of Day” to an early time.