As part of my planning for 2015, I wrote out an editorial calendar for the Hectic Dad blog. This led me to some thinking about other projects that I’m working on. While I was doing that work, it became apparent to me that I use a ton of tools to approach my days from both a planning and an execution standpoint. I finally started to make a list of them. Interestingly, Google Calendar struck me as one of those invisible tools that I use so much I don’t even think about it.
I’ve used lots of calendars in the past. For a long time, I was an Outlook addict. Prior to that I used every paper planner on the market. Each had it’s strengths and weaknesses. Most importantly, my calendar needs to stay out of my way. If it takes a lot of effort to use, I just won’t use it. Period. So ease of use is huge.
But I’ll dig deeper into that in a moment because there’s an even bigger issue…my family’s size.
We have a very active family. If you’ve read more than a couple of my posts you already know that. We’ve got eight kids currently spread all over the US. While we’re close-knit, we’re all so busy that it’s difficult to find time to communicate. We text, Snapchat, and send messages/e-mails back and forth a lot. We have a very active group message that has taken on a life of it’s own. And as you can imagine, getting us together or coordinated where a bunch of us have to be in one place at one time can be a challenge. As you can imagine, a shareable, working calendar is a huge help when we’re trying to schedule anything. Our current solution utilizes Google Calendar, but it too us a while to get to where we are. To completely understand, I need to share a little history…
Several years ago, when all the kids were all still living at home, we ran into a car problem. We only had four cars, and we had seven drivers. Not only did we have seven drivers, but each of those drivers had a job. And there were three more kids that constantly required transportation to their events. Between the work, activities, and events, that Summer was shaping up to be a nightmare. Although four of the kids worked at the community pool, we knew from experience that their schedules would all be different. To complicate things further, three of them were teaching swim lessons in addition to lifeguarding, so their schedules would be even more complex. When you mixed in the nine sports teams they kids were on…well, you get the idea. Chaos.
About that time, Gmail had taken hold in the family. I had finally moved online for my e-mail…having given Outlook the boot. I had begun using Google calendar a little bit for my scheduling, but much was still hanging on to Outlook for schedule. I just couldn’t seem to let it go. I felt like I had too much invested in my Outlook calendar to just jump whip. But the split solution was difficult for me. I had so much in my Outlook calendar that I just couldn’t see abandoning it, but Google’s calendar had some features that I was dying to use. I finally decided to make the switch and converted my Outlook calendar to Google over a weekend. That’s when the real advantages of Google Calendar started to appear.
To try and keep the kids from killing each other over car usage, we instituted a weekly family meeting. It quickly devolved into a transportation planning meeting. All we did was sit at the table for about an hour trying to figure out who needed to be where, how they would get there, and which car they would drive. It got ridiculous. The discussions were frequently heated, and we simply couldn’t get the schedule hashed out. Too much gas was being burned and time was being wasted in frequently overlapping trips. I knew there had to be a better solution, but I had to find something that everybody would use. If they wouldn’t use it, the backroom deals for cars would continue, and the meetings would have to continue. Trust me, everybody hated those transportation-based family meetings.
Since most of the kids had gmail accounts, they also had access to personal Google calendars. While we have private page-clan.com accounts, they were hard to use on our mobile phones…and since the kids were never home…mobile access to e-mail was a must. So everybody was using their Gmail addresses as their default address. I surmised that adding Google calendar to the mix of useful solutions wouldn’t be that much of a jump. For once, I was right!
Since we were trying to solve several problems related to driving and scheduling we decided to create a shared work schedule along with a shared driving schedule. The idea was for everybody to put their work times into the calendar and we could then quickly see who needed to be where and when they needed to be there. Then the drive times were supposed to be added so that those were taken into account. The operative phrase supposed to be added was the killer. It just didn’t happen. We gave it a go for a few days, but it just wasn’t working. We still had too many drivers for cars, and people were getting stranded…the panicked calls for a ride and scrambling to get people to work on time continued to be the norm.
So we had a family meeting. Let’s just say that the kids were almost as frustrated as I was. But fortunately they came loaded with ideas to solve the ongoing problem.
One of the kids hit upon the idea of creating a calendar for each of the cars. This turned out to be genius, because all the driving needs and car locations were consolidated in one place. This was really important, as we seemed to have people flowing to and from the community pool at a pretty fair clip. By timing things right, a group would drive down in the morning, then another group could get delivered midday, but only one car had to stay there. While the solution wasn’t perfect, we managed to get through the rest of the summer with far fewer emergencies, no family meetings to discuss transportation, and much lower gasoline usage. The use of Google calendar in this manner was a win on all fronts! Most importantly, it ingrained the usage of Google calendar into our family’s psyche.
Over time we created calendars for school, sports practices, sports, family activities, in addition to the individual calendars that everybody kept. For the most part, everybody shares their calendar with each other. Sometimes we don’t share the details of our calendars, but just when we’re busy or not (using the Share only my free/busy information option).
Eventually, we bought more cars and our transportation-related scheduling became a bit easier, so those calendars went into hiatus. I do still keep a driving calendar for myself, which lets me know when I’m occupied with driving alone. The advantage is that I’m reminded of my driving enough in advance that I can load podcasts onto my iPad so I have something to listen to when I’m on the road. Someday I’ll have a car where I can load the podcasts directly, but for now, my iPad is a great solution.
The other advantage of Google Calendar is that you can turn the display of calendars on and off as needed. I keep a calendar that has the kids’ classtimes. It’s our School Class Times calendar (I’ll never win an award for snappy calendar names, that’s for sure!). If I need to contact one of them, I enable the calendar display and then decide whether now is a good class to interrupt them or whether I should wait. When I’m done, I turn the display of the school class times calendar off, reducing the visual clutter.
I use the reminder feature a ton too. There are three sorts of reminders in Google calendar, Pop-up, SMS, and e-mail. If I’m pretty sure I’m going to be at my computer when the reminder will happen, I default to the Pop-up. It shows a reminder on the computer screen…which is pretty hard to miss. I’m starting to use the SMS reminders a lot more, since I’m getting progressively more used to checking the Notifications on my iPhone. I’m really bad about remembering things, so I use the reminder system to keep me updated. I have gotten into the habit of checking my calendar in the morning, so I’m getting blind-sided by fewer things later in the day. But the reminders still are essential to me.
We also have a family birthday calendar. Everybody puts birthdays on their (it’s not just family members, but includes long-time friends too). As boyfriends and girlfriends come and go they appear and disappear. But it does make me look like a genius when I “remember” one of the kid’s significant other’s birthday. Of course, as significant others and friends drift away the calendar gets purged too.
In addition, as I’ve taken on progressively more of the driving for my Mom (especially to her frequent doctors appointments) that calendar has become essential to avoiding conflicts. She’s able to put her appointments on there, so I don’t even have to add them. Usually we also run a number of small errands that are difficult for her, so I often block out time after the appointment for those errands. Of course, they’re scheduled around all the other driving that I have to do for the kids, as well as all their activities. It works out pretty well, actually.
We’ve also created a family travel calendar. This allows us to put in all our flights, train travel, and long-distance driving. On the driving side, we’ve even started to include a link to a Google map. This was especially useful a while back when we were driving back from Denver to Kansas and got caught in a blizzard…with the associated road closings. Despite poor phone service, we were able to call my oldest daughter and have her help us find an alternate route. She was sitting in her apartment in New Jersey and checking all the different places that had travel info. Then she updated our route and sent it to us…which we then uploaded to the GPS. It was a really slick use of technology. In addition, instead of having to give answers to “where are you” in generalities, we could actually reference the map and everybody knew where we were.
With the kids driving all over the country, from Colorado to Maine, Minnesota to New Jersey, it’s nice to know the routes they’re taking in case something happens. And if they get delayed and need to find a place to stay, they can always call another family member to get help. With the route right at their fingertips we’ve been able to make hotel reservations while the drivers are able to concentrate on the tough road conditions.
The other killer feature to Google Calendar is that you can easily subscribe to other published calendars. In the past, we would get the kids sports schedules from the schools, and I would spend an hour or more entering them into our calendar. With the frequent bad weather, events would be postponed and rescheduled, and I’d have to deal with those changes. Now we subscribe to a shared calendar put out by the school for each of the activities that the kids are in. When soccer games are rescheduled due to weather…I’ve got it. When a track meet is postponed because of lightning, the new date is available immediately. When venues are changed because of broken water pipes…I’ve got that info at my fingertips.
I’ve also grabbed the shared calendar for US Holidays. With my increase in interaction with UK folks, I added the UK Holidays calendar. I did the same for Canada. Now I get to see when folks in other parts of the world are off work or enjoying a holiday. It’s pretty cool.
If you’re not using a calendar of some sort to keep track of things, I just can’t imagine how you don’t let things fall through the cracks. When I was using Outlook’s Calendar, it had to be synced with my mobile calendar to ensure that I had the most up-to-date information. There were enough times when I scheduled one event right on top of another because I hadn’t been consistent enough with my synchronization of the calendars. Not only were those moments embarrassing, but they were a pain in the backside if I didn’t discover the overlap until it was too late to rectify it. Having my Google Calendar available on my iPhone, no matter where I am, is great. Of course, it does require that I have either cell phone service or access to a WIFI network. Thankfully, I’m in that situation the vast majority of my time.
One of my bigger hangups with Google Calendar is the difficulty in adding events when I’m on my iPhone. Frankly, I hate the interface and had an immense amount of difficulty getting things added. I would find myself not adding things to the calendar (worst case) or writing a note with the intention of adding it to the calendar later (slight better, but still bad case). When I discovered how to link my Google Calendars with my iCloud calendar things got dramatically better. I can now add an event to any of the calendars that I use directly from my iPhone using a calendar app that was designed to be used on a mobile device. It’s still a bit cumbersome, but nothing nearly as bad as using the web version Google Calendar on my phone.
Overall, I’m really please with Google calendar. It’s made my life a bunch easier. I’m able, at a glance, to see what’s going on today. When events are changed, I can reschedule with ease. I’m able to avoid conflicts and can schedule around other activities and family members without a lengthy search or back-and-forth conversation. I’m vastly more efficient by using Google calendar.
I’m also able to expand and contract what’s displayed. When I’m working on Hectic ecoSystem scheduling, I can turn off all the other calendars and simply look at what’s going on with online Hectic world. I’m already configured to share those calendars when the Hectic team grows. The ability to selectively display and share calendars is huge for me.
So that’s it. One of my most impactful tools is Google Calendar. Nothing flashy about it, but just the right mix of accessibility, flexibility, and pizzazz to do what I need a calendar to do. If you’re not happy with your current calendar solution, Google Calendar is certainly worth a look!
