Keep organized – SyncMyCal

I work hard at making sure my schedule is nailed down. Like most of you I have a professional life and a personal one and a calendar for each. I have a work computer and a home set up that have separate calendar systems but working off of two calendars makes life difficult. Some people do not mind separating the two but I don’t work a typical 0900-1700 (you do know military time I hope, or this makes no sense to you.), it’s more like an 0800-2000 so keeping two calendars would add a layer of complexity that I could do with out.

Google calendar and a inexpensive application takes care of this for me. By using SyncMyCal and combining my events into one calendar I can print off a daily or weekly calendar and have everything I need to do accounted for.

If you don’t have a Google account you should get one. The email space is enormous and the same account allows you to create documents presentations and notes that are availible from any machine with an internet connection. I use all of these but let me focus on the Google calendar.

I have a copy of SyncMyCal on my work computer setup for purely uploading my events to my Google calendar. This is automated for a sync every 20 minutes. As I am on my work computer going through email in Outlook and setting appointments the application grabs those events and puts them into Google.

My Home computer is really my primary PC where I do most of my stuff. I have SyncMyCal setup to sycronize everything from Google and add it to my personal Outlook and add everything already in Outlook into the Google calendar.

The end result is that all of my professional appointments are added into my personal Outlook and my personal life is kept in the same view. On a regular basis I can print out my calendar from home and see EVERYTHING that needs to be done. No need to bounce around from one machine to the next or have two separate printouts. If I am away from my computers I can use my wonderful iPhone to see what needs to be taken care of.

Google calendar can add some extra layers to your organization as well. By adding additional calendars separated like categories you can use SyncMyCal to upload, download and/or synchronize very specific events in your life. I am not that much of a geek yet so I keep everything on one calendar but the ability to segment these events is a great scalability option.