I love day planners. They are gorgeous, they come in so many flavors and styles and colors and oh my god the choices, not to mention the satisfaction I get from literally penciling someone in for a lunch date.
But.
I can never keep track of things accurately in a day planner. There’s either too much room (not enough showing on each page) or not enough room. I have to write things in two places (daily and monthly) if I really want to be able to get an at-a-glance look at what’s going on in my life. And I inevitably forget to write whatever I need to remember – the pen runs out of ink, I’m in the car, the kids start screaming – whatever.
So.
I gave up on my dreams of a day planner (though I do regularly fondle them at the local Barnes & Noble) and set my eye towards technology. After trying a number of calendar services, I finally settled on Google Calendar, and I haven’t looked back.
There are calendar applications on everything now – even basic cell phones have a damn calendar. Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo!, Calgoo, Outlook, the list goes on and on. In this Geek’s humble opinion, Google Calendar trumps them all for one simple reason: sync-ability.
If you have a smart phone, you can sync your Google calendar and contacts with your smartphone or use the Google Calendar application for mobile phones. If you have Outlook? You can sync with your Outlook calendar, which, if you then have Exchange support on your smart phone, can get your appointments and meetings on your smart phone without a separate program on your phone at all. Got Thunderbird as your mail client? That’s right, there’s Lightning and Sunbird, two great plugins for managing your Google Calendar along with your shiny new single inbox.
There is not yet a Google Calendar App for the iPhone (I know — WHAT?) but if you haven’t bought an iPhone yet, I’d totally point you towards the Android — available at T-Mobile as the G1, and similar phones coming to Verizon by the end of the year. No matter, though – you can place a bookmark to the Google Calendar mobile website, which is just divine, and make it work Tim Gunn style until they come out with something.
